sometimes i’m told that i think too much. not sure what that means exactly. who are the people who hold the standard measurements? what is the evidence that they are, in fact, not thinking enough? sometimes, after i do something clumsy, i end up thinking too much about the suspicion that i’m too careless. i think what it comes down to is a sense of imbalance – not that too much or too little thinking is happening, but that it’s not being distributed in the right places. for me, this manifests in feeling drained after completing just a few pressing but ultimately meaningless tasks. not giving myself enough space to do the thinking that i enjoy – writing, daydreaming, wondering, loving. but those kinds of thinking are of a low currency these days. with all the world’s ills, there is a high demand for innovating, problem-solving, criticism, outrage. but i’ve filled my head and my days with so much of that flavor of mental energy that i’m still crawling out of burnout. the problem with overthinking in those kinds of ways is that they deplete me for days or even months from being able to engage in the more regenerative kinds of thinking, the kinds of thinking that i’m actually good at. the ideas economy still runs on a limited resource, even if we haven’t quite sorted out how to measure the energy that goes into ideas, concern. i haven’t done much today but for some reason it has still taken so much for me to even write this blurb today. the weight of the concern that writing here, like this, isn’t actually doing anything for the world, overshadows my writing process on a daily basis, or worse yet, keeps me from writing. i recognize that this is just the soreness that comes from being away from the gym for so long. the painful, embarrassing bullshit that everyone has to write through if they want to come up with a gem. or maybe this is the best that it gets, and it’s more about recognizing the beauty of that.