More Momentary | now-time / image-space

“getting clear”

this morning started out feeling expansive. time was free and so were we. breakfast and a reiki session and suddenly feeling rather drained. only two, three hours into the day – how will i make until dark this way? all the little things that may suck the energy  away – poor sleep, a sunless day.. it’s hard to become clear about the changes that need to be made. yesterday a new thought entertained – tweak what is working in your life, and the rest will fade away. what is working? Life shouldn’t always feel a struggle in the littlest of ways. Spring feels ever hopeful yet with that brings just another phase of the reality check. It’s several months in and i’m still floating along without a clear healthy routine. I have all these ideas yet they are so hard to implement – “This is what I do because this is what I do.”

how necessary is the separation of work and home? need it be physical? how much energy is exerted just to get out the door each day. yet sometimes you just need to get out and breathe. a slovenly work ethic is dragging me down. I want spring cleaning in my life – clear away all clutter and useless devices. get motivated towards positive change – how is it possible to feel so utterly unmotivated? what is it about this social climate that causes me to feel like i’m dragging around rocks with me with every step? there’s no life in the day to day. no jubilance or inspiration.

it’s striking how hard it is to squeeze inspiration and motivation out of a climate of strife and not-having. it becomes clear the dramatic need for success oriented dreaming, dreaming and being. breathing success and excitement and doing away with lethargy. stopping all this worrying.

the waste of free time

This morning, when I was still in bed, Camilo handed me a book parted to a graph similar to this one:

The book itself was “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, about “the psychology of optimal experience”. I’ve picked up this book before, but today when I started to read it randomly from the middle, I perhaps synchronously honed in a section entitled ‘The Waste of Free Time”. The content resonated with me surprisingly strongly. I will summarize below some passages which drew my attention.

The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality.

Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture [...] are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.

Most jobs and many leisure activities [...] are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks.

He’s certainly not pulling back any punches. I found it refreshing to read those words in print, to hear him echo my own same concerns – that so many of us are trapped in this state of passivity, where we listen to music in place of creating it, view art instead of producing it, substitute actual action in our lives with the emotionally vicarious thrill of viewing actors. Contemporary ‘leisure time’ does feel overwhelmingly empty, vacuous. I see this in the alienation that is echoed in the faces of my peers. It also becomes glaringly obvious to me that we aren’t doing a particularly good job at fooling ourselves, hence this growing mountain of latent dissatisfaction.

But what can we do to address it? It seems that we must reclaim our ‘free time’. I remain uncertain of whether or not an analysis of what brought us to this point is even particularly relevant: what interests me more is how we can combat this, how we can reclaim our time outside of the job, the university, or the institution.

I believe that this reclamation can take many forms – I see it most clearly in the daily example of those in my life who have taken up the lead of activism. I see activism as a surprisingly apt example when viewing this through the lens of “flow” experience, as it seems to include all the healthy elements of what is necessary to generate and maintain flow: A dance between increased challenge and acquired skill, with occasional dips into anxiety and boredom, used as a catalyst to boomerang back into the flow zone. The job of the activist never ceases or stagnates, as there is always a new challenge on the horizon, or a new set of skills to acquire in order to achieve our goals. And when anxiety comes into play, it is often through community and mutual aid that we are able to acquire necessary skills and support that effectively eliminate the anxiety, and let us achieve our next set of goals.

I know that when reading this, it may seem a little unnerving to consider this type of frenzy as a substitute for “Leisure Time,” particularly when compared to typically American leisure tendency to “turn on the game,” or “tune in” to the latest episode. Yet when I speak to these people about their choices, they portray an almost unanimously positive image of the way that they choose to spend their time. Sure, there are the inherent stresses involved, however they are largely overlooked when compared to the benefits conferred by these involvements – A sense of accomplishment, the support and friendships of the peer connections made through the process, the pride and increased self worth that comes with not only acquiring new skills, but being able to use them towards achieving a goal, and furthermore sharing them with peers.

I know that within us all there is a shred of objection to the image that I am painting: In such an active lifestyle, when does one get to relax? How does one manage to recharge oneself in this active sphere? Won’t that just make me feel like I’m working all the time? Here are my instinctual observations:

• The manner in which many of us typically spend our ‘leisure time’ is not particularly fulfilling. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard to feel any sense of self pride in watching a movie or an episode of television, no matter what type.
• These ‘leisurely’ activities in which we engage often encourage us to atrophy, as pure inactivity leads to deterioration of skill. They also use up a disproportionate amount of time. They don’t provide us with rest or revitalization: they often do the opposite, getting us riled up or just draining us emotionally in some aspect.
• If we feel drained after work or school, what can be more revitalizing or empowering than being able to use the remainder of our time towards something that we do genuinely care about?
• There are steps that we can all take to preserve our own energy levels and vitality that don’t interfere with either work or leisure. Making enough time for proper sleep is one thing that can dramatically transform the way you spend your day. The other thing which is hugely transformative is making time for meditation. Investing about 20 minutes to meditation, (I practice both in the morning in the evening- roughly the span of a single tv episode) can dramatically increase mental clarity, emotional reasoning, increase energy and health, among a host of other benefits.
• When you find a better and more effective way of relaxing and recharging, an enormous amount of time is made available for you to achieve your dreams!

All in all, the necessity of change seems pretty clear to me. I identify in my personal actions in the recent past a strong urge to reclaim free time, and I don’t think I’m alone. Personally, my struggle is deeply related to the nature of work and play. After years of being conditioned to have a strong resistance to work, I’m still engaging in the process of redefining and restructuring what the concept even means. I am reaching a point where the lines between “work” and “play” can blur, where the time I spend in acts of creation doesn’t have to be characterized as positive or negative based on a financial interaction. I’ve also rounded a corner where I can acknowledge that when I do make time for the less monetarily-influenced actions in my life, (activism, community, self-investment, learning, art-making, etc) I feel dramatically less struggle in my work experience. Achieving a balance seems to be, at least for me, key.

Striking a balance means going against everything that is seemingly invisibly encouraging me to slide back into inactivity, and instead going forward and filling up my leisure time with opportunities to achieve fulfillment: like Free Ideas, where I get to work with an awesome community of individuals to spread exciting ideas and information; or more personal challenges, like the the Reiki I course I am starting this week, which will run for a span of 12 weeks. It means going against that evil little thought of “why bother?” and getting back into studio practice and art-making. Because I owe it to myself to have optimal experience, and so do you! I’ll end with this quote, also from Flow.

The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.  - C.K. Brightbill