8/3/21
8/31/21
My Google Calendar looks like a Cubist masterpiece - pastel boxes of all colors colliding together, barely contained by the columns for each day of the week. I did a reasonable job of following my schedule when I didn’t actually have to follow it, before the semester had actually started. I was only pretending to follow the schedule because I wanted to be able to start this next bout of studies running. I think it was only a matter of hours before I’d deviated completely from my plan.
Was I a little pissed at first? Absolutely. But, as the saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” And it helps to be able to laugh a little at yourself, too. So I didn’t get too down on myself when I couldn’t scurry from place to place as efficiently (or honestly, robotically) as I’d like.
I’d like to think the ideal way of living will always be a carrot dangling just out of reach. Reaching for it and failing is half the fun is what I mean to say. I thought that having every minute of my life lined out would squeeze extra productivity and joy out of my day, but what I’ve honestly noticed is that in my most producitve days, my highlights have been the unexpected moments in between my scheduled events. Consider today’s sequence:
These events made up my day. If this were the last day of my life, I wouldn’t point at any of these things that I just wrote (even thought the classes, studying, and talking to my dad were the important, scheduled things) and say that was my favorite moment, or the moment that stuck out the most. Actually, my favorite moment today was ten minutes before my last class.
I’d arrived to class earlier than I thought I would and I ducked out to eat some of the trail mix I’d passed. The sun was angled just perfectly in the sky so it could shine through the narrow alley between two buildings and onto a small stone bench near my class building’s entrance. I sat facing the sun and closed my eyes, enjoying the warmth and the gentle dampness of the stone against my legs from the afternoon storm that had passed afew hours ago. It was just almonds and raisins. Nothing fancy. But I love the way those two complement eachother. The raisins were chewy and sometimes a little tart, and the almonds had a smoky flavor and their skins flaked off sometimes and stuck to the roof of my mouth in a way that wasn’t annoying, but made it more interesting to eat them.
I’m not getting into these details to be flowery. They really did stick out in my mind that much more. How many of those moments have I missed out on in the past week as I scurried from one place to the next?
Let’s discuss the pro of scheduling, though - the pro of discipline and planning. My writing this blog post is an obvious example of that. This is quickly becoming the most prolonged writing project I’ve ever engaged on. It doesn’t matter that I don’t really proof read my posts. It doesn’t matter that nobody reads them (hopefully). It doesn’t even matter what I write about. What’s important is that I show up and am willing to participate in something larger than myself - to stand at the bottom of the mountain that is the creative process (or the process of building anything, really) and get to experience the journey.
I know. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now. What I will say is that I’m having fun and I encourage you to go out and do something like this, too. The way I see it, my website is like my personal little plot of land, carved out on some server somewhere. These posts are like little flowers or brushes I plant. It doesn’t matter that they’re not prize-winners or that they don’t really serve any use. They’re mine.
If you made it this far, stay tuned next week for a post on Libby. I’m really loving the app and I wanted to share my experience with it.