From the August 2023 digest:
Hot summer, mellow dreamscape.
Written posts for Sponge have returned. They will be useful for shorter topics. I like podcast episodes to be longer than 10 minutes. Anything shorter will be turned into a written post.
Also, written posts are useful for linking and embedding. ex: Youtube videos.
Also, written posts are easier to navigate, when it comes to multiple posts about the same book. I shall try to keep the podcast episodes under 1hr. Anything more I have to say will become its own written post.
Fiction writing is happening again. I don’t think I mentioned this in July’s digest. “in|somnium” (WIP title) is steadily going forward, then backward, then forward again. (My “backstitching” method.) It’s dreamy, all right.
I said in July’s digest that I would talk about the “too stable” aspect of meditation when August ends, so here it is.
August, just like the end of July, has been stable. Meditation was stable, and thus life was stable as well. (I am writing this on September 9th.)
Mostly, I think this is due to the relative absence of the concept of time. So, I am trying to move even more in this direction… by not trying to do particular things at a particular time. Instead, I will have overall time buckets. For example:
- When I wake up, I will do various morning activities (breakfast, meditation, etc).
- Then I will write fiction.
- Then, without looking at the clock, I will eat lunch when I feel like it. Or take a nap and then eat lunch.
- Then I will work on some other things: translation, office stuff, etc. When I feel like I need some movement, I will take a walk or do physical exercises here.
- Then I will eat dinner without checking what time it is.
- After dinner, I will read/watch stuff/meditate/stretch.
Repeat this until a significant event happens. Ex: travel.
With the above pattern, the only time I need to refer to a checklist, if at all, is the time between lunch and dinner. The more I stay away from clocks and checklists, the better. I mean, an overall checklist is nice, but I don’t need to keep checking it. It’s the same as how a clock is nice, but continuing to check it over and over again is detrimental.
On a day-to-day basis, I work more when I don’t decide what to work on. (!!!) There is no real reason for me to have to work on specific things on a particular day. I record the podcasts weeks in advance; fiction has no deadline; the blogs are gone. So, maybe, the “me who is made to do things” thinks that the “me who decided that I must do those specific things on a particular day” is stupid. Like, girl, you don’t have to do anything. Why would you decide what to do ahead of time? Even if I were to do nothing, that would be fine. See, the more I accept the “me who doesn’t do anything,” the more, ironically, I do.
Also, as mentioned in the previous digest, meditation is becoming a way of life, like writing. And one of the elements that characterizes what I do while meditating is to just do what I feel like doing. This isn’t hedonism or being whimsical. It’s simply that whatever my “logical” self determined to be “reasonable” is likely to be the result of ego brainwashing from more than a decade of so-called education, followed by “working” in the “real world.” So, following “logic” and “reason” is the most illogical and unreasonable thing I could possibly do.
What my inner self wants to do tends to feel infinitely better. And no amount of ego statisticizing and averaging can tell me that what feels right is lesser than what the head deems “rational.” I have close to zero interest in mass logic these days. I guess I’m interested in which buttons to press to get a post like this published on the interwebs. But beyond that, I’m not very interested.
And there used to be a time when I thought topics like these wouldn’t become part of the digests. But, life is meditation, and meditation is writing, and writing is life. Eating is life, sleeping is meditation, and they are all the same things.
Oh, and did I mention I lost weight? I weigh about 48.5kg now. This is about how much I used to weigh when I was in high school. This weight loss probably has something to do with sleeping, meditation, and writing as well.