Cues

I should really be doing my homework. And I will do my homework in a minute, right now I thought it would make some sense to write one of the entries currently due.

Sometimes I want to be exactly where I am, in the company I’m sharing doing the things I’m doing. Being who I am. There are other times when I kind of want to be somewhere else or be someone else, want to be with someone else. I’m aware these are feelings and the something I need to do is to find a way to instead be grateful. This is my life. I only get one and what value is there in spending any of my time wishing I was somebody else or I was somewhere else or I was doing something else.

Instead surely the value is in simply doing the things I want to be doing and that’s part of the reason why I’m writing this entry right now. One of the things I’m pretty confident about is I want to be a person who consistently writes a few hundred words each day about what is happening, how he feels, or how he thinks. Right now it is Sunday the 6th of September and so I am writing a catch-up entry for Thursday the 3rd of September.

This raises questions. What was I doing on Thursday, Friday and Saturday that meant that I didn’t have the time to write a few words? Why is this thing I think is important to me something which when challenges or problems or friends or work arise I don’t make the time to do.

Same is also true, to some degree, of many aspects of my life when I am on a date I find I wish I’d paid a bit more attention to my appearance or perhaps I had prepared a little bit more carefully in some way. When I am at work I wish I spent a little bit more time working and I had a little bit more information and preparation behind me with everything that I do. When I attend a Chinese class I nearly always feel I wish I had spent a bit more time studying and preparing for the class.

The reverse is also true. There are times when I feel prepared and I feel grateful and I feel like I’m exactly who I ought to be. But I think it’s fair to say that right now I feel a tiny bit daunted. I am tired and as I sit here I’m finding I’m yawning and my bed beside me looks increasingly appealing but I feel like at 7:10 in the evening if I lay down to rest then it will turn into sleep and then I will have a difficult night. There’s something about going to sleep a few hours too early which means it’s then just too easy to end up waking up in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep.

I feel very conscious my environment is the thing I have control over and it is also a very significant part of whether or not I do certain things. For example, I really should go to the gym and when I lived in a flat where I could see the gym out of the window I very often did. When I had a instructor I took classes with twice a week then I went twice a week to the gym and I worked very hard. Now that the gym is in town, it’s out of sight, then I have I have really not been doing anywhere near as well as I had been because my habit has changed and I don’t invest the same amount of time and energy in exercise.

Exercise here is a stand-in for all the things I want to be doing more of. Ppart of the reason I’ve written reasonably consistently is that I removed all of the things from my desktop and I made it a plain grey colour and then I put icons for the important things on it. There are icons for my Chinese classes and for my daily writing. Every time I sit down there’s a small visual reminder I want to write consistently. It works, so I should do something about everything else I want to do too.