Plans change.

Life happens.

Work picks up and you’re not able to go to the gym for a bit. You find that very frustrating because you had developed a nice routine and you were starting to see some results! That girl you finally had the courage to speak to and were starting to build a rapport with doesn’t have any free time for a couple of weeks.

It can be very frustrating to have to momentarily abandon something, whether that’s by purposeful design or a result from a lack of time and reacting to life’s circumstances.

My pertinent example is that of my writing this blog.

I started writing around this time last year and struggled with being consistent, but eventually I purchased the domain and I went live with four articles. Between writing at a consistent pace and continuing to read at least a book a month,usually in service of writing, it was very easy to get mad at myself for not spending more time writing or reading. During a lot of this time I inhabited the mindset that I didn’t have the right amount of time to accomplish anything.

Now it’s easy to not have “enough time” set aside for something. I say this in dual-fashion. When the popular video game Skyrim came out some twelve and a half years ago, I refused to play it unless I had at least two hours to play. My defense was(and honestly still is), that it’s an immersive role-playing game and that one of its appeals to me is that it really sucks you into the massive world of the game. And in defense of playing a video game, I’ll say that’s fair. But if it’s something you truly love, something that when you think of how long you haven’t been doing it makes you mad, then maybe any time will do.

So I’m asking a genuine question here…what’s so bad about only having a few minutes to read or write? If you know that more time in front of the computer getting thoughts out is better than less, why not just type away for a couple of minutes? It’s not the romantic version of a person slaving away over their craft for hours at a time in a deep creative flow, but it is realistic and at least habit forming.

There is something positive to be said for just continuing the practice.

“Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly”

Progress is progress. Five minutes working on a story is better than more time being annoyed that you don’t have that nice two hour block of time for it anymore. Even now I’m waiting for my dad to visit me so we can have lunch. I had maybe forty minutes to start writing, and I’m annoyingly consistent at rejecting such a “small” window, for what reasons I don’t know.

There’s something that we all hate about not having “enough time” for whatever it is that we do. However, always having that standard in our head is not always helpful, in fact I’d argue it can be generally harmful. If I only read a new book when I had an hour to really pour into it,knowing that I have a bad habit of not lining up time correctly towards the end of my night, then who knows when I’ll actually commit to reading.

The thing is that if you enjoy wasting your own time and also bullshitting yourself, then have at it. Continue to set arbitrary timelines and standards, so that you can always have some chip on your shoulder that explains “why I can never get anything done”. I’ve had that chip there, and it’s still there sometimes, although thankfully a lot less than usual.

Begin Again

Life is a continuous string of moments. One on top of another like a never-ending mille-feuille. This is the Buddhist way of viewing humans, not as objects but as processes. That we never really are, but a continuous state of becoming. I’m not a Buddhist scholar nor a Buddhist, but I do believe this viewpoint has merits.

Just as a new day begins when the sun rises and the eyes open, so do near infinite opportunities arise to begin again.

There is always a new moment. You can always change your perception or the direction of your attention. If I’m writing this and get distracted by my cat, even after five minutes I can always stop, and begin writing again.

Now it’s taken time and effort to get in the habit of stepping back from what I have become distracted by. Sometimes I end up in the scenario where I am asking myself why I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and then even acknowledging that I’m distracted and okay with it, but that’s a part of my next article on meditation and mindfulness.

One can always restart the clock in the present, instead of dragging around the corpse of the past in perpetuity. There will always be the temptations of hanging on to previous feelings, failures and ideas. We have all had a day that started poorly, and ended poorly. Only for us at the end of the day to say how it was just destined to be a bad day because of how it began. Another way of framing is that one thing in the morning happened, and it sucked. Assuming it wasn’t a death or dismemberment, it can and should be isolated. While I’m not going to argue that events in a life aren’t a part of a continuous sequence of events, I believe that we at times attach ourselves unnecessarily to some more than others. 

At first it is immensely hard…to step forward into a new moment and shed the skin of the previous like a snake. To try and let go of the attachment to that feeling of anger from the preceding event, especially because anger can feel so satisfying and cathartic.

I’m not suggesting a wave of apathy and nihilism to wash over you and your thought processes. I’m merely suggesting a more intense engagement with the present, so that what happens doesn’t have to attach itself to you like a mental octopus with suction cups that drain your well-being. Instead you end up really participating in the present moment or feeling so that you can develop the habit of realizing upon retrospection that it is just a memory.

Whether it’s realizing you’re distracted during a conversation, or in the middle of a workout and you become aware that you haven’t really been paying attention, you can always just let go of that feeling of anger or frustration. You can always make the next statement or set the most dedicated you’ve had in a long while.

Restart the clock in the present.

Begin Again.

**This article is the first part in a miniseries on mindfulness**