Time passes incredibly fast. I was at work earlier, and it was maybe 530pm. Next thing I knew, it was 7pm, then 730. And I left. I got home. Worked out in my home gym for a while. And then it\u2019s 930pm. So I shower and prepare to go to bed. I thought maybe I ought to write a word vomit before I slept. Hopefully I\u2019d have been able to be done by 1030 or 1045, and be asleep by 11pm. But now it\u2019s 1159pm and I\u2019m only just starting to write this.
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\nClearly, I\u2019m incredibly time-blind. [1] My sense of time passing is completely mistaken, mislaid.
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\nI find myself wandering through the bookshelves of my mind, running my fingers along the various books and essays I\u2019ve read about the nature of time. The book that features most prominently is A Sideways Look At Time by Jay Griffiths. She spoke eloquently, at her own pace, about the ills and perils of man\u2019s obsession with colonising time the same way he\u2019s colonised space \u2013 and how we all live in tidy little demarcations \u2013 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. 9-5 jobs, 5 workdays a week, 10 days of leave a year. Public holidays that have become commercialised routines. Everything goes according to plan, everything is planned to bits, calendars are filled out in 15 minute intervals. The Earth itself is not precise enough for man, with its imperfect rotation requiring the addition of leap days and seconds every 4 years.
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\nI\u2019m not sure where I stand on this. I think there are a few points on a continuum [2]. At one end, we have a sort of total idleness and indifference to time, which few people ever really get to experience. Getting to that state either requires a sort of renouncement of everyday life \u2013 becoming a nomadic wanderer type, a wildling \u2013or it requires (I think)\u00a0having a substantial amount of resources. Fuck You Money. What that precise $ amount is, isn\u2019t quite so clear. But when you get to that state, then yeah maybe you can really operate entirely on your own internal rhythm.
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\nInternal rhythm. Now that\u2019s a phrase I hadn\u2019t thought about when I started writing this. I was just thinking, what is up with me? Why is time passing me by so quickly? Why is so little getting done, and why do I feel a little bit neurotic about it? I feel like I should be more productive, like I should carve up my time into little blocks and then get very specific things done in those little boxes.
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\nAnd there\u2019s a part of me that\u2019s very against all of that. Like there\u2019s a part of me with a death wish of some sort, wilfully just refusing to follow orders, to obey, trying to sabotage almost everything I do. Some literature has pointed out that this saboteur is really just fear, trying to maintain stasis, trying to keep things familiar, avoid anything challenging or difficult. And I know in my life that too much stasis is basically death. You can get too comfortable with any one thing, and too much comfort is also basically death. I need to get myself uncomfortable.
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\nAnd yet at the same time I find myself feeling chronically, deeply, spiritually tired. So I gotta run through my checklist. How is my sleep? It\u2019s okay, I think. How is my exercise? Ah, I haven\u2019t been exercising as much as I should. So I hit the bench press earlier today, and I do feel better in a \u2018deep physical way\u2019 \u2013 I mean, under my skin, the engine seems to be purring. What about diet? I think I\u2019m eating okay. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m drinking too much coffee. What about hydration? I\u2019m drinking water, but probably not enough. What next? I need to be doing these vomits regularly and get them out of my system, because they\u2019re cathartic. It doesn\u2019t matter if I don\u2019t reach the end-goal with tremendous perfection. I just need to get there, and then I can drop.
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\nBut gosh, I do think I need a bigger break. I think I need to get away from home and go somewhere else, maybe by myself. I took a break last year around Christmas-time, and I mostly spent it just lounging around the house for a week and a half. I didn\u2019t get a lot done. A part of me regrets that, feeling like I wasted my time off. A part of me felt like lounging was precisely what I needed. But it\u2019s been barely two months later and I\u2019m already feeling lethargic and listless. I\u2019ve gotten a lot better at dealing with lethargy and listlessness \u2013 I can function despite it \u2013 but I also think the point is to get to a state where I\u2019m NOT lethargic and listless. Like, that\u2019s just not how life should be.
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\nThe wife\u2019s got 3.5 weeks left to go on her course, which involves both of us waking up really early and leaving home together, and neither of us having much energy to do things around the house when we get home. It does make me appreciate the amount of time and energy she spent every day just keeping shit in order \u2013 laundry and dishes alone can be\u00a0massive timesinks. But they can also be time spent watching good\u00a0videos or listening to good podcasts, so I\u2019m not so sure.
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\nWhat I do need \u2013 what I do remember thinking was \u2013 that it\u2019s important to fix the little things. To be mindful, and to make changes to the small things that repeat themselves.
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\n_____
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\n[1] I\u2019ve written about this before I\u2019m sure, but lately I\u2019ve been thinking it\u2019s not so bad if I repeat myself. I\u2019ve clearly developed a more coherent voice. I write with bolder, cleaner strokes now. It\u2019s worth repeating myself if things get clearer, more succinct, more punchy.
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\n[2]\u00a0And as I write this I wonder about where the metaphor of a continuum comes from, where I inherited that, and what the alternative metaphors might\u2019ve been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Time passes incredibly fast. I was at work earlier, and it was maybe 530pm. Next thing I knew, it was 7pm, then 730. And I left. I got home. Worked out in my home gym for a while. And then it\u2019s 930pm. So I shower and prepare to go to… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[342],"class_list":["post-10440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-time"],"yoast_head":"\n