underscheduling my life

If you’re a regular reader and wonder why I haven’t posted for a few weeks, it was purposeful. And if you weren’t wondering…well poop.

I needed to detach myself from certain aspects of my normative behavior, take a wide-angle view on things by underscheduling my life. I had felt paralyzed for a little while, like I wasn’t making progress with regard to my passions. So, I put a hold on my martial arts pursuits, I stopped fretting over my lack of progress on the guitar, I took a break from running and I stopped worrying about what my next blog post was going to be. I put a lot of thought into creating good content on this blog and I felt myself repeatedly coming up empty. I had 35 drafts of posts with nothing flushed out. When I tried to come back to something and expound upon it, the original intent of the post eluded me. I knew I needed a break.

An influence on this “hold” I placed on things was a slight running injury – I had symptoms of plantar fasciitis, so I web-MD’d myself and laid off for a while. This frustrated me immensely, because when I finally feel a flare of passion for running I come up with a running injury instead of a barefoot half-marathon. Instead of beating myself up over it I made my decision to step back from the world for a bit.

So, instead of producing anything worthy of praise (learning new songs, logging more miles, writing semi-decent blog posts), I played videogames, read a couple books, took more naps and hung out with a new group of friends probably too often – in other words, I became really good at doing nothing. I let simplicity take hold and ran with it, and I’m already feeling the emotional and psychological kickbacks a mere three weeks later. I feel refreshed.

If you’re feeling like I was a few weeks ago, give this theory of underscheduling a shot. Even if you have kids or other responsibilities that take up a vast amount of your time, find a little time in your day to just do nothing. The rewards are subtle but immense.

Tags: minimalism, philosophy, running, simplicity, zen