Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Back to the Monkey

No matter what I do in the morning: meditate, stretch, situps, plank, read the Bible, read 12-step books, pet the cat(cats if I'm lucky), calmly protect quiet time to read a long article or two in the Journal, monkey brain nonetheless breaks in all the time and draws my attention in a thousand different directions. In many regards it is just the nature of the beast. Modern living, raised to a higher degree than usual by entrepreneurship and having no true boss, just responsibilities to a host of clients, plus responsibilities within the family.

My issues are, in short, the epitome of first-world problems. And yet I have to seek to manage them down and focus on specific things to a certain extent or my being and energy is entirely frittered away and dissipated into a flurry of check marks on my task list. 

There are toolkits that help, many of them drawn from the realms of religious, self-help, and management literature, much of which just parrots the other while placing the accents in different places. First and foremost comes habit and process. Having the toolkit, doing the readings (and the meditations), posting to the blog. In the end, to quote Bill Murray's inspirational chant from Meatballs (which oddly I think back to more and more as a touchstone, despite what a dopey movie it is) "it just doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter." Which comforts me.

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