Old Blog Thoughts

I once had a blog that I started for the same reasons as this one: to help me better remember the key points of topics I had a casual interest in, and to express my opinions of those topics.

That initial purpose faded as the drama of my life became a more interesting topic. As much as I tried, I could not be as interested by news about people I didn't know in places I never went than by what affected me personally. Personal disturbances linger and demand reflection. News stories inspire flashes of outrage. I believe that the more news a person consumes the more outrage metastasizes in  a combination of activism, or hatred.

But I digress. Girlfriends and jobs can cause stress. I needed a place to process that stress, and my old blog became a diary that was updated frequently with these processes.

The old blog was public until it was only diary and had to be hidden to protect myself and the people I wrote about. The posts were too personal for 'public' consumption.

I aired out my deepest, most personal thoughts on that blog during periods of emotional upheaval, then slowly stopped updating it a few months ago to give myself space from the thoughts of my life. I tried silent reflection.

Having had some time away from my past to focus on the present has made my old blog useful in deciphering my thoughts of the events of my immediate past. At first I was reluctant to be blunt. It was not supposed to be a diary. The bluntness was useful. I can now see some wrongness in those posts that I couldn't see while I was writing them because: Time + Honesty = Clarity

Using recent insights, I noticed some negative thought patterns in the old entries. To begin writing an entry I needed to be dissatisfied with myself for not writing first. Almost every entry would start with self dissatisfaction and self disappointment. Then I would use that new motivation to write about the topic that I liked/disliked, usually further developing an argument following a contentious disagreement with someone. (Sound familiar?) I would end by making empty promises to change my habits, not make the desired changes, and start the next entry with the same narcissistic disappointment.

I complained about myself and was disappointed in myself in some new way in every entry because I wanted to improve myself. Hahahaha! By those same standards I would be SO disappointed in my present day-to-day! I have less possessions today than I did last year! And waste my time 10x more!! Even after everything, I didn't know how to appreciate what I did have. I needed to be humbled more.

Reading through these old memories reminded me of my forgotten thought processes and forgotten obsessions. You know, the ones that are so frequent for a short period of time that they run in the background. These processes change little by little until they are gone, replaced by new thought patterns that seem innate. Time, honest documentation and reading theology helped give me the resources to read between the lines of my diaries.

Asking myself the right questions was one of the answers:

Have I stopped caring about myself or have I stopped nitpicking myself? Why did God allow me to suffer? I will always have problems, how does my thinking help me solve these problems?

Obviously I can't read my future diary...only living in the present having learned from the past can give me the clues to the future, as only good actions in the present can create my future.

Therefore, I have to focus and work on the things that make my life instead of destroying what I built and starting over. Patience is a virtue and pride is a creep.

Deciphering my life's history from my present point of view inflicts good pain, thoughtful pain, hopeful pain. That's a good reason to write a diary, and a good reason to take a break.

Not Doing Anything

I sat shotgun in the Sprinter van and looked out the window at all the cars, and the sad people in them. I looked out the windshield at the snake of cars ahead of us. They weren’t moving. They hadn’t moved in minutes. Up till now we had crept up in the traffic, inching our way slowly to the mouth of the tunnel, but now we were stuck.

I wasn’t doing anything but dying of boredom. I could only sit there, and wait for the boredom to pass. In Manhattan there would be traffic, but there would also be people to watch. As much as it might be pleasing in the moment to hit those people, they would supply my eyes with some entertainment outside of the obnoxious voices of the radio.

Bodies and minds always hit a breaking point during this ordeal, and motivation is extinguished upon arrival home. The mind and body demand relaxation from the spirit torture of traffic exhaustion.

Listening to music, reading a book, watching a video, all social media.....it is all an entertaining distraction from the hellish commute. This commute is one reason that living in the city (and its surrounding sprawl) erodes patience, motivation and intellect.

I had to get home and do something with my brain and my body. First I spoke to my roommate, who was in the same place on the couch when I left in the morning. She was bored enough from a similar type of endless, relaxing media consumption to want to talk to me about my day. It was a miracle.

Conversation is the first step to thinking. Doing is the second step, and for me, writing counts as doing. But doing is work. (Writing is work.) After a commute, working seems like more....work. Sometimes we need reminding that relaxation isn’t earned simply because we reached home. We can relax for a moment, but too much relaxing too soon leads to less motivation and less doing. It leads to more mindless media consumption. A second wind is always needed when the spirit is depleted, and it has to be equal parts motivating and relaxing. It has to use the brain and the body. In this case the body is the mouth.

Using my mouth lead me to work out my body. I exhausted my body. That was good. Though my mind was engaged, it was never exhausted. I focused too much on my body’s exhaustion as an excuse not to exhaust my mind. Exhaustion is temporary. Our body can withstand remarkable exhaustion if we treat it right. It is all mentality.

Temperance is a virtue that traffic exhaustion tries to murder. Don’t ever let tunnel traffic deplete the spirit.