Beyond avoidance

Reverb 10 Prompt (from Jake Nickell): Beyond avoidance. What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

Shoulda, coulda, woulda… Well shit, I just beat myself to a pulp in my last post for refusing to play and sing in the same room with other humans. Cut me some slack here Jake! Sure, there were countless other things I either avoided doing or didn’t make the time for over the course of this year. But I’m at peace with this state of affairs (for the most part) because I’ve at long last come to accept a couple of things about myself and my life.

First, I don’t like to be busy all the time. I seem to require a LOT more down-time than most folks. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who blocks off time the way I do for unstructured, non-purposeful activity. I’m just not willing to give up my walks, my movement meditations on the living room floor, or my aimless rock-out sessions up in my bedroom studio. To-do list be damned!

Second, I’m not going to quit my corporate zombie job until my wife lands an academic position (hopefully for the fall of 2011). We need x dollars per month to get by, and if I get off the treadmill, we’re not getting by. Taking on more debt is not an option. I’ve maxed out all my living-on-borrowed-time years ago, during that glorious stretch otherwise known as “my twenties.” So for now the day-job is non-negotiable and, including commute time, it takes 55 hours of my week right off the top. By the time I get home from work and then attend to all the necessary household chores and bodily needs, I have maybe an hour, at best two, to do anything else, and by this time my energy and focus are nil. My friends and family with kids have no sympathy for me, of course, but neither do I weep for them. They all chose to be parents, just like I chose to be a self-centered ne’er-do-well! Privileged we all are to live the way we want to, that’s for certain.

So whatever it is that I want to get accomplished, beyond providing the basic necessities and comforts of home for my wife and me, has got to get done on the weekend, along with the more time-consuming chores and intermittent family/social obligations. My weekends follow an inscrutable mathematical formula (assuming I’m not traveling to visit family): I always have exactly three things that I have to do (i.e. grocery shopping, laundry, finances) and exactly seventeen things that I want to do. Time is the constant. Two years of data graph out into some inescapable conclusions: 1) Choosing to do one thing is simultaneously choosing not to do the other sixteen things; 2) Progress in any one area is very gradual when I try to make headway on multiple fronts; 3) Speeding up progress on any one front necessarily means slowing down or halting progress on some other fronts.

For instance, while I was playing in the band, things progressed steadily — from learning the songs to playing local shows to being featured in the local media to out-of-town mini-tours — but at the expense of all my other personal projects. I got next to nothing done creating a new career path, I wrote almost nothing other than tweets and status updates, and my own music stayed trapped inside my head and on old cassette tapes. I left the band in June, focused more on these neglected projects, and since then have seen some steady progress in a few areas. The fourteen other things? Those lines on the graph are either horizontal or else tilting down toward ground zero. Here’s how it’s mapping out right now [Note #1: A positive slope indicates progress; zero means holding steady; negative means atrophy. Note #2: I suck at math, so none of this makes a damn bit of sense]:

Of course, this month has been all about Reverb 10 — so much so that about fifteen days into it I crashed pretty hard from the lack of balance. Again, by choosing to spend my time blogging and commenting, I chose not to do a lot of other things. Like pretty much everything else. When my right arm started to hurt from too much mouse wagging… — that’s when I knew I needed a break. For the rest of the month and in the coming year, I’ll do my best to stay on my feet, juggle my seventeen things, and keep my mouse arm out of a sling.