In the recap of my life as an almost vagrant, you see I’ve been settling into a routine. Its defining characteristic is doing whatever the hell I feel like, which, contrary to what one might believe, isn’t solely masturbating, binge watching television series (Fleabag, Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale) and emptying rum bottles down my gullet. I suspect when I do do those things, which is considerably less, it is out of habit, a past desire’s echo to escape overbearing realities.
Presently, life is good principally because, like Maxine Waters, I’m reclaiming my time.
However, my mindset is still under the old regime. Neurons are forming new pathways and this takes time.
Mindfulness is showing me the truth so I can match my new behaviours with the right emotions. I remind myself that life is good. This is exactly what I wanted: to not be told when to arrive, when to eat and when to leave; to grow my own food in a small space and to have time to invest in other interests. Becoming free after physically removing yourself from the 9 to 5, has a largely mental component Tim Ferris addresses in the 4-day Workweek. (Chapter 15 Filling the Void: Adding Life after Subtracting Work).
I’ve accustomed myself to being miserable, so that’s how I’m comfortable. Although happiness may not be the goal, since contentment seems a more reliable objective, even a more consistent contentment feels unnatural. I am restless. I know the emotions will catch up, though, and am settling in to doing and substituting my bad-habit-dopamine-fix activities with more positive ones.
I’ve added a return to Capoeira practice to my daily routine and want to continue learning to play the berimbau.
Berimbaus at work
I think a lot of the clutter in my head is from not using Facebook purposefully. I’m addicted again to those red alerts. Mostly from my personal page, although I created another to sell plants, from which I’ve sold no plants. (The sales come from posting ads on marketplaces). You really don’t need to be scheduling posts for a month. I could just post when I come across something interesting. Or I could not post at all and spend the time reading or exercising or sleeping or going for walks, anything that isn’t social media addiction.
We’ll have to wait and see how the other things I mentioned in my recap evolve (relationship with The Crazies; relationship with alcohol, and others). Even if things don’t go the way I’d like, I find comfort in my struggle’s authenticity, meaning my objective is to openly and honestly please myself and this is a cushion breaking my fall, whether I trip or jump.
While we wait to give things a chance to become, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone (what a horrible idiom!). I’ll share journal entries from before my decision to leave wage slavery as I kinda edit them (“kinda” because my focus is on editing five short story trilogies and a penthology for publication). I’ll start next week. Until then don’t fret “loneliness is truly a kinda tax we pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind”…
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