A Year Of Becoming Your Truest Self
It’s been an interesting ride since I started posting a daily blog article back in March of this year. Now it is almost the end of August.
Let’s call this period a warm-up, or spring into summer training camp. I think the year ahead is the one in which this will all begin to make more sense.
The last few days I have been observing how I spend my time each day. I do this all the time anyway, but I have really been checking the clock against what has transpired so far in the day at a much more intentional level.
Yesterday was fascinating in its mundane-ness.
A quick recap:
Up at 5:30am
Had a cup of coffee, listened to a chapter of The Three Musketeers (audio book), stripped the bed to wash the bedding, and got dressed.
6:30am
Did my One Hit Wonders, plus rehearsals and strength training exercises (not currently One Hit Wonders), changed the laundry when needed, laid out for 15–20 minutes, and cooked my first meal.
2:45pm
Sat down to eat my first meal. Made the bed with the washed bedding. Read a chapter of Cosmos & Psyche.
4:20pm
Ate my second meal, and I’m not really sure what the heck I did besides that. ?
I lost the thread.
6:30pm
I was done for the day. I literally got ready and went to bed, I am sure before 7pm.
This morning, I awoke at 5:15am.
I had slept fairly well, but I still wake up anxiously every 3–4 hours. Old traumas die hard. And no dreams that I can remember.
What a way to spend 24 hours, right?
WTH am I doing with my life?
Was this a well-lived day?
Ah, I think I know the answer to the first question, at least directionally, and that is what this article is about.
And, yes, I would say it was a well-lived day right up until 5pm.
Then … WTH?
That’s how I want to spend my evenings?
Going to bed early, losing clarity on what I did the last two hours of the day?
I slept until 5:15am, so obviously, it seems I needed the rest.
I also didn’t know what to do with myself after I ate my second meal of the day.
This is probably why I lost track of what I did those last two hours. I did my get-ready-for-bed routine, and I did have a couple of healthy snacks around 5:30pm, so that was good.
What might I have done instead?
The open mic?
Well, the earliest I could have left was probably 4pm, assuming I wanted to read a chapter, make my bed, and have my first meal.
Traffic from my house to there is terrible at that time of the day.
Thus, a 50-minute one-way trip would have taken 1½ hours.
I would Have arrived at 5:30pm. It started at 4pm.
Would there Have even been a slot for me to be able to play my three songs for the evening?
Also, I would then have eaten out for my second meal, maybe broken down and had two beers, which may have led me to stopping in for a dessert on the way home.
Then $50-60 later …
Yeah, I’m glad I just went to bed early given this as the other option.
That said, I don’t want to “space out” for two hours again, and I don’t think I need to go to bed at 7pm most nights.
(I went to bed at 7pm the day before, too, and had a wild night of big dreams.)
What to do instead?
More of my One Hit Wonder candidates?
No, as I wrote yesterday, I have hit the wall.
If and when I am ready to start up a new one, it will go to the front of the line.
It will become my “eat the frog” first task of the day, and the other One Hit Wonders will get pushed out to later in the day.
I know this about myself. I don’t like starting new things. Thus, best if I do it when my willpower is at its zenith in the morning.
Here’s what I am going to do instead:
Come up with a series of questions to ask myself about what it would mean to live in a way that is getting me closer to developing the psychological freedom to live my truth.
Write in freeform style to answer those questions during my “free time” in the afternoon/evening, until I am ready to go to bed.
Do this for the next two weeks. I may decide to go to a couple of open mics, too, but TBD.
Review what I have written and see if I can consolidate it into a new vision for the coming year.
Although I am not sure exactly what questions I want to address in these “pages” of writing, I do want to address the following:
What are my values, for real? It will probably not be the full list of ten I have shared before, perhaps not even five. I want to get to the essence.
What are my rules to live by that flow from these values? I suspect that part of my conflicted nature and desire to pile on comes from a lack of clarity on these rules.
What does my inner compass tell me? Where am I out of alignment and going off course from my True North reading?
How can I address “problems” or “opportunities” in a lighthearted and free way versus a heavy and plodding approach?
How can I continue to organize my life so that the radical lifestyle design I want to put in place becomes ever more a reality?
And relationships. There’s a key.
Yesterday, I was updating my spreadsheet for daily metrics tracking and notes about what I did the day before and the current day.
I am writing over the entries from the previous year as I do this.
In the entry from last year, there was a note to myself that I had to change my living situation. I was saying it was time to sell this place, to get the heck out of this hermit hole.
I was reacting to isolation, the “hermit” cloister experience of living here.
And yet, here I am again, a year later, no closer to doing so.
I am not as despondent as I was last year about the isolation and difficulty of living the life I think I want to live.
But … yeah … same place, same time, same Bat Cave station.
What gives? Why am I so reluctant to let this place go?
Clearly, I perceive a real value from owning it and living here at least part of the year, otherwise I would have changed my life more radically, wouldn’t I have?
That will be another big question to address.
And values over vocation, why is this so hard to achieve?
It was interesting to listen to the podcasts I was talking about in yesterday’s article.
After more than 30 days of abstinence from listening to any podcasts, they were a shock to my system. And I don’t like most of them. Yuck.
I continued to sample a few more of them yesterday evening (yeah, that was one thing I did in those last two hours, but only for about 5–10 minutes). And this morning I sampled three more.
So far, I have found two of them that I think will help and can actually qualify as “quality” research.
But I won’t hold my breath. They may end up disappointing me, too, the more time I spend with them on parts of my morning walks. We will see.
Even so, there is such a focus on work, career, starting or running a business, or “making it” that comes through all but perhaps one of these podcasts.
Perhaps it is our fascination with the question “what do you do?” in this society.
Also, Podcasts have taken over the place being a movie star or a rock star held for my and previous generations.
Jim Morrison of The Doors predicted something like this in 1970.
And, I think that comes with the motivation to even want to create a podcast.
Does anyone “really” do it for any reason other than to “get their message out” or as a platform to support or be their “business?”
Heck, I could say the same thing about this blog.
I know that originally I meant it to help promote our music by capturing The Leavers’ “adventures” as well as be a helpful and interesting read for fans.
Yeah, it was about “doing something” that Could be termed instrumental. It may still be.
However, I am too much in the weeds of daily production to know for sure.
Yes, I’m on a Highway to Yeah.
I am following my Fool energy and going wherever this daily practice wants to take me.