Month: November 2019

I’m still not sure what’s more exhausting – having a lot of things to do, or not having a lot of things to and feeling guilty about it. I had convinced myself that two weeks in the Philippines with really no assignments other than to write a short paper and journal each day was a light enough load. Today I board my flight out, and I’ve written exactly three times (including rn) and have not even loaded a new document to start that paper. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do – waking up in the morning and immediately scrolling through my phone. On my feed are articles and videos that used to capture my imagination – calls to “unlock your potential” and “increase productivity.” In reality, all I want to do is luxuriate in my inertia and understand my value as a human being when I’m not being productive at all. I would consider this an excuse to be lazy, if I wasn’t so burnt out. Can one be burnt out and lazy at the same time? Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to have a healthy relationship with capitalism, if that is to exist at all. Most of the talk about resisting the temptations of capitalism have to do with money – not falling into massive dept or being addicted with spending money or procuring the things that money affords. But what about the other aspect, the spending of time and energy? It’s here that we all know that we don’t have bottomless accounts, but without having a grasp of how much time is left in life, or what it truly means to be depleted of energy, I just spend and spend and spend. Sometimes I spend even while thinking that I’m relaxing. All the tasks that run through my mind during meditation, checking my emails while hanging out with my loved ones, having a great day and then going to bed feeling guilty that I didn’t post or journal about it. The productivity complex has a grasp on me in ways that I’m fortunate that money doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve got it any more figured out when it comes to the game of capitalism. As the holidays approach, yet another light at the end of the tunnel that might must be a mirage. Yet another transition of years that I aspire to be smooth sailing but that might end up actually chew me up and spit me into 2020. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for this time that I’ve had to rest, because I recognize that so many others don’t have this luxury. But still, can I feel tired after a vacation without the burden of feeling guilty about that, too?

SO many plates spinning rn. I was convinced that finishing Te Whāinga was the light at the end of my tunnel. But instead, new old tasks have popped back up like buried bodies, like dust under the rug. I shouldn’t speak of them like that. These tasks were once ideas, goals, points of inspiration – they still are. There was a time when I felt a shortage of them, when after several hours of binging a show I didn’t even care that much about I wondered Is there more? Am I doing enough? You bet there’s more. So much.

For the past few months I’ve been meditating using audio guides – beginning the first few moments of each day to the sound of another’s voice, of the stroke of a harp. But yesterday I forgot to charge my headphones so, for the first time since I can last remember, I was left to the sound of my own brain. HOLY shiT there’s a lot going on in there! It ends up that the mantras and chimes weren’t actually leading me down a sound path, they were distracting me from the fact that I’ve gone way off track.

A lesson of meditation is that, when I find myself in such a disposition, it’s not about trying to steer myself back. It’s about being okay with the fact that I’m here, and discovering what this situation is trying to tell me. I think? I don’t know, I haven’t actually engaged with spiritual leaders, communities, or literature enough to know whether the past few years have actually just been me putting on a caricature of mindfulness. *here’s where I resist / let myself jotting sign up for meditation classes on my long to-do list*

But the fact that I’m here writing again, at least for today, is a start. Yesterday I thought it would be okay to skip journaling, only to find myself in a tar pit of an email exchange that I started by being too verbose. It ends up that the simplest tasks are the hardest habits to pick up.

A couple of weeks ago I woke up with a strong impulse to delete all my tweets, so I did. 10 years of impulsive thoughts, random musings, reactions to things that may or may not have had anything to do with me, and forays into hashtags severed of context – all gone with the click of a button. It’s not that there was anything incriminating there (that I can think of) – but as I scrolled through my feed as a do you really want to do this procedure, it felt like going through a photo album of bad haircuts. It wasn’t so much of a “I wish I hadn’t said that” vibe but more like a “let’s not let that be a quote of mine that’s available for everyone to access forever.” Most of it was cringey jokes, spurts of pretentiousness, and self-promotion attached to memories of disappointment when my grand announcements landed like a hotdog tossed down a hallway.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done a digital purge. About a year ago I deleted my facebook profile, and way back in 2009 I went through the same motions of deleting several years of my early tweets and made a commitment to only post things on the internet that were “truly useful to the greater public” 🙄

All of those decisions have generally been pluses, and in many cases have been more satisfying than anything that I’ve ever impulsively posted. But still, there are digital footprints that are lost forever which I wish still remain. My Asian Avenue profile from the 90’s, mostly for nostalgic purposes. My blogs from the early 2000’s which probably still do exist somewhere, but are lost in broken code. iLL-Literacy Youtube videos which I also deleted during The Great Purge of 2009 because they weren’t as “professional” as how I wanted us to present ourselves – videos which are ironically more valuable to me now than anything we put out with a press release. It seems that my urges to delete everything are no less compulsive than whatever it was that drove me to put that out there in the first place. Maybe one day I’ll scroll through all of these posts and also decide to wipe them off the web with the click of a wand. These days, I’m questioning why the temporary, the vapid, the ephemeral have a bad wrap. Is there actually any single moment that you’d truly want to “live in?”