Skimming through the journal entries for the month of February, I’m amazed at how quickly the various things I attend to in a given month fade from mind and memory. I listen to podcast after podcast throughout the week, but however interesting an episode might be, I just follow up the next day with more information, and then more. There’s just no attentional bandwidth left with which to consider something in depth. Case in point, I heard somewhere today, on some podcast, that it’s better to “get to the bottom of things” than to “stay on top of things.” The Tim Ferriss Show. That was it. I was barely able to recall even that detail, and that’s from a two-hour podcast I listened to just today, while I was running some errands. I just keep listening, keep scrolling, keep staying on top of things. But never any real depth is plumbed. And it’s all self-imposed. All done from a stance of willful ignorance. I’m giving up the ghost, which is the dreadful, shameful thing I swore I would never do. But I’m doing it. All the recent focus on aging, on disease, on decline. I’ve listened and scrolled and thought myself into a rut, a bad groove. Time to bounce out, to break free. But first, sleep.
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Up at 1:oo am. Did some mindful movement (my version of yoga) in bed and it felt great. Drifting back to sleep I was thinking about how regular writing and creative output might be just the tonic I need right now. I love the idea of regular public output, but I’ve never found the requisite motivation to stick with it. I know it shouldn’t matter – the public output vs. private journaling – but there’s something about the perceived accountability, however imagined, that can galvanize my creative eye to pop open. Seeing my life and the world through that eye is intrinsically awesome, and I need some awesome right now.
