10 Minute Watch

For two days, I neglected my blog and found myself unable to focus or concentrate much on anything substantial. I wish I had a good excuse–perhaps something like “I was trying to locate myself in the continuum of life”, or “I was re-examining the contents of my commitments”–but alas, those excuses are inadequate for justifying my temporarily discontinued project of making a spectacle of myself online. To be fair, I was having my share of mental tedium that left me wanting nothing but sugar, sodium, and lots of comedy–a kind of joker’s fever, if you will. But fortunately, a few laughs and poorly-spent mornings later, I find myself beginning to feel more alive and excited several new developments.

For one thing, I found that coming to terms with I’m truly absorbed by and passionate about is quite important. If I’m not interested in a certain activity (such as reading a Pulitzer Prize winning novel), I shouldn’t try to force it into the mold of an activity I am actually truly excited about for the sake of personal development. Doing so not only wastes energy by consuming more attention and self-discipline than is necessary, it is also inefficient, unsatisfying, and masochistic. Of course, I will probably become more and more used to performing an activity once I have habituated the tedium and normalized the repetition, but  I can only rationalize my ego so far. It’s like adjusting your watch 10 minutes faster: you may think you’ll never be late to an appointment again, but really, let’s not kid ourselves. Your mind knows full well the crap you just tried to pull, and it will remain loyal to the “true time” that was 10 minutes slower and reject the blinking cop-out wrapped around your wrist.  To force yourself to believe in the adjusted time on the watch for the sake of productivity is to perform Orwellian Double Think on your own mind–a feat that even big brother will find quite pathetic.

My conclusion is this: the path is not “out there”, and if I keep trying to look for such a path rather than forge my own, then I will always be lost in pursuit. Instead, once I take responsibility for my current state and recognize that this path is my path, then I am no longer lost, for every fork in the road I take from now, every trail I blaze, each journey will be sincerely mine. I will have freed myself from the lie that is the 10 minute watch and the big brother that is my own uncompromising mind.