Free Time

Once every two or three weeks, I have one night after work that's my free time. Not that I don't have times when I watch a movie at home with my girlfriend (Wednesday nights), times when I go to the movie theater (every other Tuesday night), nights when I go out to eat (Saturdays), and other fun times in my life, but they are scheduled. My whole week is scheduled.

It's current incarnation

Because what happens during this free time when I'm at my place instead of with my girlfriend at hers, if I'm alone and not saved by one of my roommates, it is always the same: I I eat a bunch of ice cream in front of the computer. I answer all kinds of emails, I've finally gotten myself to stop working on my food blog at night, as a rule, but sometimes I have some little task to do, like posting my newest cartoon on my and two friend's Facebook walls, organizing my Netflix queues, trying out some songs that have been recommended to me, recording the latest book or movie I've finished (I keep lists of all the book I read and movies I watch. TV shows too, though less rigorously), things like that.

Just a few minutes ago, I realized I didn't really have any chores left for the day, and I kind of panicked. “Well, now what am I going to do with my time?” I thought. “Oh! I could have fun surfing the web randomly like I used to always do and love doing.” But then I thought, “Wait, are you sure there's nothing left you really ought to do?”

Then I gave myself the task of writing this. While writing it, I've more-or-less unintentionally thought of a few more things I ought to do tonight. For instance, I need to answer back an email to a company that wants me to confirm my date and time and give them the Groupon number for this class I'm taking with them. I don't know why, but for some reason that particular task seems particularly trying. I suppose it's because Groupon's wesbite is shitty, and I know it might be annoying to find this stupid number for them*.

Then I tell myself that a good use of my time might be to read a good book. Right now my bedside book is Alan Watt's The Way of Zen. Or maybe I should play the dancing game on the XBOX 360 or just dance by myself in my room. It's fun, I often love doing it, and it's good exercise to make me feel better about all the ice cream I've just eaten. But I'm just too full to dance.

I've become so uncomfortable doing anything purely for fun. I seem unable to relax if what I'm doing isn't in some way productive. Maybe that's all my mom with the school year's regimen of school, homework, two chores, room cleaning, and thirty minutes of piano practice before we could play on the computer or video games or watch TV (thirty minutes total for all electronic devices) and the summer system she kept in a pink binder full of lined notebook paper she'd made into a grid by using a pencil to draw vertical lines along the pages. Four chores, thirty minutes of piano, one scripture copied out in a journal, journal writing, a math worksheet, room cleaning, and twelve exercise points. There was a reference chart that indicated how many points one earned by doing x number of each exercise. Ten pushups were 1 point. Five laps were 1 point. Twenty-five jumping jacks. We went to our section of the pink binder and placed a little check in the grid corresponding to the task and the day of the week,

Arielle Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Room       x

Piano

Chore       x

Chore       x

Chore

Chore

Scripture  x

Etc.

I need a fucking pink binder. I need to check, check, check, check, check things off the list, accomplish useful things, things that are good for me, until I can allow myself to relax and enjoy my day. But I don't have a pink binder. I do have email and note pads (physical and iPod) and scraps of paper full of to do lists, but once those are done, I still don't quite feel the satisfaction of the pink binder. Because that was definite, prescribed from on high, as it were. But as an adult, there might always be more things I ought to be doing.

Perhaps a lot of that is twenty-something anxiety, I don't know, I guess I hope so.

"Torschlusspanik" - German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages."

*It was.

Zen

I was shaving my legs with a new razor the other day when, for a moment, I experienced the delight of the smoothness of the blades on my legs. With my monkey hair, a high quality razor starts wearing out after three or four shaves. I'm unwilling to spend $7 each week on razors, and, thus, I only get this feeling a few times every two months or so.

But my brain hijacked that moment. Just as soon as the good feeling occurred to me, I spoke "aloud" in my head, "Ah, that new razor feels so smooth. It's too bad it's going to be rough again so soon."

And from there I continued to articulate the thought bubbles that make up my stream of consciousness. "You're letting loss aversion take you from just enjoying the now again! You always do this. As soon as you realize something is nice, instead of enjoying it, you put it into words, and then you immediately realize or fear you will lose it. Then you might plan how to get the good thing back again, but when you do, you're only going to forget to enjoy it as you articulate the pleasure and then fear its loss again and plan for the future again in and endless cycle.

"And now you're continuing to ignore the good feeling of the razor by berating yourself for perpetuating this cycle, all still in words! You're not stopping even now because you seem to think your ideas are so interesting that you must encapsulate them into words in order to remember them and, perhaps, share them with others. 'Maybe I'll write a little essay or draw a little cartoon!' It's the same way you feel the need to take pictures of every fucking interesting or pretty thing you see, like it's your fucking job, as if if you don't, no one ever will. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DOCUMENT EVERYTHING! Sometimes you're the documentarian in life, and sometimes you're the audience. You need to push that line way over. Enjoy some moments in life without that compulsive need to document your thoughts keeping you toggling between the past and the future!"


This is what it's like in my head 99.9% of the time. It's as if I'm constantly on a couch, addressing the Freudian psychologist in my head with my stream of consciousness and then analyzing it in turn as the psychologist, which analysis in turn is treated as more stream to analyze. Ad infinitum.

The .1% of the time when it's not like that, when I am in the moment, occurs when I am either meditating successfully, losing myself in singing, or eating excellent sushi (occasionally other amazing foods work) if I close my eyes and am able to lose self-consciousness for a second at a time.

And why is it that, though meditating can be so pleasurable when I finally get my thoughts to quiet down and I feel the expansive peace of being one with the universe/the taming of my left brain, it's so hard to get myself to actually do it? Meditating does take time, of course, and it can be very frustrating to sit still for so long, not knowing whether or not you're actually going to get something out of the endeavor. Perhaps it's understandable, therefore, that I can almost never get around to doing it.

But why can't I learn to quiet my mind when I'm in the shower? When I go for a run? When I'm at work at Trader Joe's putting chips on a shelf?

It's not just those feelings of peace that I'm after. It's actually better thinking through less, for lack of a better word, thinking. Better thinking through less wording. Each of the thoughts in my head originates as one of these thought bubbles. The whole thing is encapsulated in that bubble already. There is no need to articulate it, except when talking or writing, yet I do it ad nauseum. It slows down my thinking and draws me out of the pleasure of thinking. Not only that but I believe it inhibits creativity and diversity in my thinking because I'm pulling my thoughts onto a track by wording them. Instead of listening, I'm talking. Everyone who knows me knows I have a bad habit of this in conversation, but I also have this habit in my own internal conversations.

What quieting the left brain can feel like. I hope I don't have to have a stroke to learn this lesson.

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about an experience the narrator goes through that seems remarkably like the left hemisphere stroke Jill Bolte Taylor experienced. In Zen, the narrator was hospitalized for losing his mind.

And yet my $75 meditation mat sits there, gathering dust and cat hair from its only user.