stuck for the time being
I think I was 11 years old when the movie Serendipity came out and I became aware of John Cusack sending me on a spiral of watching all my my sister’s VHS tapes. In Serendipity John Cusack keeps meeting a quirky woman in a way that John Cusack often meets women in these movies until they decide they should be together at the end of the movie. Really the movie has very little to do with fate and more to do with the restaurant named Seredipity 3 that they eat at. But in a weird serendipity style meet-cute way, I opened Instagram during a moment of weakness only to immediately be fed something about a way to stop using Instagram. All it said was to make a “No-Scroll” notebook, where every time you find yourself scrolling or having the urge to scroll you pick up this notebook and write a big-ol’-hand-wavey whatever in it.
Honestly, I’ve been writing, deleting, and rewriting this blog post for about 3 weeks now. It’s finally fermented into actual thoughts because of this stupid little hack that I never would have found without opening thing I hated so much. I haven’t actually used the notbeook all that much, but just having it means that I need to make a choice every time my brain wanders off: scroll on my phone or do the thing I promised and write in the notebook. Usually this means I do nothing for a while and stare into space until I’m ready to get back to doing work or exercising or reading or hobbies or cleaning. It’s a suprisingly good reminder to be mindful.
As I remove myself from my phone I really feel like I have more clarity about what I want to be doing, or at least need to be doing. Most of the time I just want to make coffee or watch people walking down the street from my balcony, but other times I want to update my dotfiles to automate away another mundane but annoying part of my life or read one of the 20 books I’ve started or write down something with a nice weighty pen in my smudged handwriting. It also makes it easier for me to think about what my goals are and what I need to do to get there, my biggest goal being to leave New Zealand, but that is a multi-million step process.
There’s also an issue of “this is all well and good during the term break but will I keep it up when I’m back at work” and I can honestly say, I most certainly will NOT keep it up. Something about work has become so draining that it’s just impossible for me to physically get out and exercise with the intensity I want. There are some days where all I can do once I’m home is lay down and fall asleep until the next day even. So, whatever I’m doing now, I expect to do it at one-seventh of the intensity, meaning once a week. But for now, I just need to enjoy that I have the freedom to make that third cup of coffee and sit down to collect online radio stations that will help me sleep when I’m completely burnt out.