Lately I've been busy with Notion and morning pages, so the blog has been quiet.
Once Notion and the morning pages started feeling stale, I came back to the blog.
A spring weekend, and the world is in turmoil because of COVID-19.
Deaths and confirmed cases are increasing exponentially.
My personal life isn't easy either. I've recently, rather abruptly, gained weight. I hover between 68 kg and 69 kg.
Just last month I was around 65 kg. Still, my physical condition isn't as bad as I'd expected.
I got a call from Balmers Korean Medicine Clinic, which I started going to last summer and wrapped up last winter.
It was to say that three months had passed since ending treatment, so I should come in for a check-up.
Three months after treatment... Six months of treatment ended so quickly, and now another three months have already passed...
A hollow feeling welled up.
My personal life
still feels like a stranger circling the edges. Thanks to the law of attraction, maybe? my resilience has recovered somewhat compared to before.
In the middle of all this, to build at least some kind of self-directed routine, I've been doing morning pages, visioning, and ilgi-ilhoe (one-diary-one-meeting) practice here and there,
and I've been regularly taking Menatech's medication, which is insanely expensive. About 400,000 won worth of five different pills, taken every morning and evening for a month.
I can't tell if it's working yet. There's nothing that's clearly gotten better, but it's not as bad as I'd feared.
In those moments when my head clears up, when I have room to think about what's ahead, about what's essential,
I keep push-pulling with a new kind of pressure: "I need to put some plan in place while I still have at least this much resilience left..."
I used to drive around Gongju, Cheongju, and Daejeon, window-shopping hot places and old buildings, and before I knew it I was looking forward to those weekends back in Sejong for that small pleasure. Lately, thanks to COVID, I can't easily step out of the house.
The reason I'm posting today is to save a passage from some book whose name I've forgotten, which I'd jotted down in Notion. The preamble got long.
Enough chatter. Let me copy the passage over and get back to what I need to do today.
You need to think about what kinds of activities make time seem to vanish, and how you can turn them into something monetizable.
You aren't managing time; you're managing your life, your decisions, your actions, your emotions.
Time is already given. Famous people get the same 60 minutes per hour and 24 hours per day as you do. So the difference between exceptional and ordinary people isn't how much time they have, but how they choose, use, and invest that time.
If you're not doing what matters, if you're not managing your life properly, if you're busy working for others, if you're making others rich while failing to build a happy home for yourself, and feel confused and powerless as a result, it means you aren't managing your priorities efficiently.
You brought all of it on yourself. You allowed yourself to become this way, and you stopped time from creating any change.
What's your answer to "Did I actually do anything meaningful?"
A line that hits the bone.
I have many things I want to do, things I think I should do, and so many things I'm actually doing. But I realized there's no ultimate goal behind any of them. I realized I've been behaving as if they're just a kind of amusement that I'm satisfied with simply doing.
While telling myself "I must do this," I'm only doing, thinking about, or preparing for it at the level of play, which is probably why the long-term results have been so meager.
The business ideas I've jotted down are similar. Even brilliant ideas stop at the momentary amusement or catharsis of doodling them down as a hobby. They've been kept frozen as records of the past for so long that my daily life has taken on a kind of blank, inertial quality.
The amusement of the moment you write down an idea ends right there,
and the repeated, accumulated processes without results produced a repeating sense of relative deprivation, which produced chronic listlessness, which in turn made me see myself as a stranger, thinking, judging, getting hurt, pushing people away, keeping my distance... a vicious cycle that keeps repeating. That's what I ended up thinking.
