One of the things I reflected about this morning was a little less about the things that we do, but rather the things that we don’t do.
Why? I guess cause in thinking about life, I’ve come to realize that tradeoffs are inevitable.
I guess it was true from the very beginning of my life, but I just wasn’t really thinking about that in a deep way.
Perhaps that was my own fault – no, it almost certainly was my own fault for being distracted by things and shiny objects and the temptation of “just one more” throughout my entire life – but I suppose the world is replete with temptations that pull a person if they suffer the woe of not having any structure.
The things we do are one thing – discipline is a hard thing to master, and an even harder thing to integrate into a person’s personality – but what we consciously choose to exclude is something I think we should think a lot more about.
That chapter of manhwa that you just read, the next one that you also read, the new series that you browsed and looked at after that – if we took these away from your life and substituted them with something else, what would happen? What would you gain, if not over a single day or perhaps a week, then over months into the years?
What would happen if you got rid of that doomscroll, the video watch, the planting down of your butt on a chair just to stare at a screen?
What would happen if you could consciously eliminate the things in your life that do not contribute – the things that ultimately only serve as dead space or dross on your conscious experience?
I think I am still learning about that in some ways.
There are, after all, times when I find myself overly emotional about things that people have said or not said – unhappy about things that are happening in my living environment and in the places that I call home; some of the ways in which I cope are not always the most productive ways of doing so, whether across short-term or longer-term time horizons, if there is one thing I have become much more sure of in recent days, it is that I have the capacity to improve, and that the limiting factor is not effort, but the ability to see.
To be able to cut off what does not matter, to strengthen what does, and to move forward without the limitations of a cluttered mind:
That is the fruit of knowing what we will not do, and I look forward to harvesting it.
