Death the greatest teacher. daydreaming for maximum performance. our robot overlords.

I am bowled over with gratitude. It is the end of the weekend, and I am actually almost done with my homework. It only took all weekend, and I had time to run other errands, I even had time to leave my room. My brain doesn't feel like melted plastic.

How did all this happen?

I gave myself time to do nothing.

I will explain. I didn't exactly have time to just day-dream, but even those of us who are most busy, still need to go to lunch for at least a few minutes, travel from point A to point B, etc. And during that time, most of us are absolutely terrified of having nothing to do. It didn't used to be this way. There has been the option to disappear into a good book while you ate for a long time, but never have such intense levels of distraction/entertainment been available, as now, with the advent of the smart phone. People can't just sit down and focus on eating their food and ponder over their life. Or, well, they can. But they don't.

It's like a monster in the closet, people are afraid, maybe even a bit terrified, of just being with themselves, without something to distract them. But like the monster in the closet, if you actually do just sit down with nothing strongly pulling your attention, you find that you don't curl up into a dehydrated husk and start smoking. You're ok. The fear is more in the approaching the thing, not the experiencing of what's actually there. again, like the monster in the closet.

"Ok, here we go again with the technology bashing" you might be thinking. And your right! technology has emotionally and intellectually crippled and isolated us and cut us off from the juice of life. But it's also offered us the possibility of a greater quality of living, objectively speaking, than we have ever had in recorded history, as well as the potential for an incredible level of knowledge sharing and communication and organization, and economic and educational  equality.

Of course, how much we make use of that is dependant on squishy, human factors, and so very little of the potential for good is being utilized. Mostly we use technology for surfing porn (about 30% of total Internet data transferred.) or non-pornographic distracting/entertaining videos (maybe 50ish percent is stuff like YouTube and netflix)

though I suppose those info graphics are measuring data, not time. Perhaps there is a lot of erudite reading going on to, and it just takes less bandwidth.

anyhoo. Human nature. Great potential, often unrealized.


the point I wanted to make, with a specific illustration from my own life, was the Archimedes, eureka type moments that come from those precious opportunities we have, to take a break from our intensive work, and let our mind relax and drift. these are often the moments when we have breakthroughs, make new and novel connections, solve problems we've been banging our head against.

If we flip on our phone the second we're free of work, we deprive ourselves of the breathing room to do that. to day-dream, invent, and also to take a step back to look at the overall direction of our life, and make the big, life-steering decisions that can lead to much more satisfying lives.

While I was doing that over lunch, not listening to an audio book, just trying to remember to chew enough times before swallowing, and letting my mind drift, I had a eureka moment with my homework: as I've mentioned just about every week, the shear volume is a bit soul crushing, or at least body and brain crushing. I've been continually measuring, reflecting on my process, and trying to streamline and improve things in various ways, repeatedly prototyping new protocols and testing to see if I can somehow reduce how much of my life it takes and how painful it is.

I've made steady progress on that front, but there was really no way to condense the actual actions down very much. I could do the bare minimum, but I had to balance that with not shooting myself in the foot for exams, because this material is supposed to make that much easier, and it should, if done well.

I know there are some (many?) students who basically sit in class all day, and work on their homework. I've been alittle tempted, but I tried it once, and it was impossible for me to task switch fast enough to capture the notes and stuff that the teacher was doing, with any depth of understanding, and lots of stuff was missing altogether from my notes and consciousness. Granted, some of what I missed were just aside the teachers made, but those aside are half of why I'm there, if I just wanted the facts I could have gotten them from teachers who weren't as good. I want to soak up all the wisdom they have to offer, and I don't have time to marinate in it now, so I just have to capture it for later review.

but I had a brainstorm about the things I could be doing while the lecture was going on, without missing anything extra. at least while the specific presentations were being given, it little extra work, to just record down what was being said, in abbreviated form, and that's basically what the presentation summaries and chapter summaries are. I realize I could probably do that, do a passable job, and not be zoning out on the lectures. I needed to switch back and forth between a few tabs to try and capture asides they made, and I've missed a few, but I've gotten most of the extra notes, especially since they tend to come before and between the actual demonstrations.

I've also started spending some of the break-time in between class segments, filling in a few more details, summary type things that are easiest to do when the info is still fresh in my mind, that would take twice as long to do at the end of the week, when I have to fully re-read everything to get the gestalt of it so I can summarize. Granted, that would be better for memorization. But if they wanted me doing that they should have given me a non-ridiculous amount of stuff to do.

as is, with this new strategy, I've cut down probably... at least a third, maybe a full half, of the amount of time these take, and it should say something about how overwhelming that was, that it still took me working an hour or two every week day, and some break time between lectures, and most of Saturday and Sunday, to finish things.

But I'm doing it with actual breaks in between, and I'm taking care of other essential things too. Life has much more balance to it.

So: I'm super grateful to the universe

And: I'm super appreciative of the power of empty time, not filled by distractions

I'm sure you could do that in a not particularly profitable way, I was kind of day-dreaming about my work process, reflecting on what I'd been doing and wondering what else I could do. So that's semi directed. Your results may vary.

But I feel like another important thing that could use some daydreaming time, is reflecting on how one is living life, in general. I frequently pose the question to myself: how am I going to look back on this (my current way of living) from my deathbed? will I be satisfied with how I lived, or regretful. I think the overwhelming majority of us, as Thoreau put it, "lead lives of quiet desperation." We are unhappy, our lives feel meaningless, and the fear and distraction during all idle moments is to avoid facing this simple truth. Avoiding it will not solve it.

But perhaps some focused daydreaming, some good questions, will begin to.

who said that quote?...
ah, good ol' Marcus Aurelius: "it is not death that men should fear, but never having lived"


I have some cool pictures I want to post, but then I'd want to talk about them and it would take too long. Hmmm, ok, lets see if I can do it in under 5 minutes...

from Gottman institute:
book : seven principles for making marriage work
card deck: 52 questions to ask before marriage or moving in
both: cat approved

a baby pepper I found inside a pepper plant. I find the colors
and shapes deeply, deeply beautiful, aesthetically pleasing
I could stare at it for a long period of time
it's even more pretty, in real life and even closer up,
which is how I looked at it. Some things give me
the tingles, just because of how aesthetically pleasing they are.
makes me think of the potion shop I visited saturday
but that story will likely never be told on this blog
simply because I don't have time.
short version: it was really aesthetically pleasing, too.

hmm, 8 minutes (have I mentioned I'm almost obsessively tracking my time, to try and manage my efficiency and reduce time waste?) a bit longer than I hoped for, especially for two little pictures. As I thought, hard to keep myself from talking when a new subject comes to mind.

anyhoo, I hope your lives are filled with meaning and time to pause and daydream constructively about what is most important to you, big picture. Even ten minutes can make a difference. even five.

have a nice week ^_^