2019 has been a busy year for me, inasmuch as “busy” applies to a person who sits in one place to do his work and aspires to such an existence pretty much indefinitely.
The sheer fact that I am Slogging at all is an achievement, a startling contrast to my precisely (checks archives) zero posts from August 2017 to December 2018. I covered much of that journey already when I returned here.
Beyond some loose thread posts I wrote (or will write) and my reviews of ‘Game of Thrones’ final season, the Slog is still pretty quiet though. Same with Twitter. That’s intentional.
I’ve been pretty busy elsewhere.
Focus is a resource, right up there with food, water, shelter, and companionship. Why? Because focus determines how we spend our most valuable resource: our time. Thus, focus needs to be protected, conserved, and deployed well – else it will be exploited, misused, and wasted. The modern world, its business driven by an unquenchable thirst for ever-higher profits, has moved into the psychosphere and interferes with many peoples’ ability to achieve and maintain focus.
Ok, fine. Interferes with MY ability to achieve and maintain focus.
The only victory to be had in the face of such overwhelming opposition is to opt out.
Whatever you want to label the nameless opposition – tech companies, the Illuminati, lizard shapeshifters, all three at once – social media and the 24-hour news cycle were too easy a crutch for me to use to shift my focus from personal care. It made my bad habit of procrastination that much harder to resist, which, speaking sales, is an ideal situation. Pretty dehumanizing though.
I realized how much I needed to unplug. Doing so reminded me we are all the product of how we spend our time. The calculus is simple but the effort can be enormous.
Reflecting now, what I got better at and gave my spirit rise was remembering why I did what I did. I reconnected to memories and associations I turned a blind eye to. In many cases, the roots of our most enduring problems trace back to childhood and I am no different. The brain builds upon what came before; nothing is more central to our actions and choices than the foundations of our worldly experience.
I’m going to keep writing, word after word. You’ll see some on here – I won’t abandon the Slog in such a way again – and some on social media. Most will go into my ever-growing epic fantasy tome The Darkest Fate. The book is where I came from and it is where I am going.
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