On Mantras 2/2
Why Do I Start My Day with "Remember You're Here"?
Remember you’re here.
I have this phrase to thank for my successful restart at life in DC. Getting here alone was a significant thing. I hold the memory with tenderness.
But as I’ve gotten more and more of a hold on things here, I am aware of two growing concerns.
Firstly, it seems so much easier to lose something than to gain something. I want to be wrong about this that at least there is a 50/50 split in life. I am not sure.
Secondly, I am worried about this optimized life I have made (and continue to pursue.) I am not a machine that needs some screws tightened from time to time. I am a human being, and that means that my being simply necessitates that I rest more, that I “live a little” more often than I allow myself.
Settling into my new life here, the meaning of that phrase has changed, but it still sometimes sounds like the way I originally meant it: you don’t have time to waste.
This concern was recently clarified to me by force in the book The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han. It is a short book but short in the same way of a dagger. There, he made a targeted critique of today’s society by its emphasis on mult-tasking, saying that it is often seen as the epitome of civilization that we are capable of doing more than one thing at a time. With venom, he continued his congratulations of this modern skillset connecting it to the base level of mere survival in the wild, that a wild animal is also deeply proficient in multitasking such that it is not eaten while eating, does not lose its young, does not lose its mate, stay aware of its surroundings, etc.
Han continues his rolling critique toward something he calls hyperculture, but this moment was enough to make me a little breathless about my way of living right now. In the same way that multitasking is also a base survival instinct, and therefore not a realized level of human progress, is it not the same for this sense of everyday optimization?
I find myself only able to really stay calm if I know that I have already scheduled out my week and know that even if I end up “off track” in my day, I am still doing alright because my grocery delivery is already on the way and thus “saving me time” and is a “smart” move anyway such that I can maximize my time for rest and not another life admin task. I would say I have a unique appreciation for routines, but I can’t help but wonder if my first mentioned fear here also helps keep my belt tight around how I eat: I change my 5AM-5PM diet almost never, having eaten basically the same thing for the past 3 years are nearly the same time, +/- 30 minutes on average.
It seems to me that I may very well have confused a sense of agility with a sense of hurry.
At the same time, I don’t see any other way of doing things. I still make regular time for studying things and writing and reading. In fact, I just made a new schedule, for fun, in something I call my “best life calendar,” a secondary calendar profile I made in my Google Calendar. The use of this tool is to help one compare what one could be doing when accepting new plans. I may have lost that use of it in that way. It is the ideal lay out of my day if I had total control of my time, still factoring in a job day. Here’s a sample day of mine:
5:00-6:00 AM - workout and first breakfast
6:00-7:30 AM - writing and reading
7:30-9:00 AM - second breakfast, commute and language study
9:00-5:00 PM - workday with an hour lunch when I usually read or take a walk
5:00-7:00 PM - commute, relax, and dinner
7:00-9:00 PM - writing and course time
9:00-10:00 PM - sleep alarm kicks in and I wind it down
What is this? For whom is this an ideal day, and why do I feel compelled to do this?
For one thing, these are things I love. I have had some version of this schedule for probably more than 10 years. Setting aside for the moment the fact that I am probably very neurotic, this is a nice thing for me, until I worry about my sense of time as a defense against scarcity. Am I growing my life or defending it with this schedule? Is either the same as living?
It’s these questions that bring me to worry, even after a sense of excitement for a day like this . For the moment, I will simply accept that I enjoy this idea and tire of it at the same time, depending on the day. You may be happy to know (as I am) that I let my Saturdays be free and unscheduled (so that I can maximize rest, of course) and have a regular block of time peppered in there called “chill the f out.”
More soon,
Trevor
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