Can I tell you a secret? I don’t really know where this is going. Not because I have nothing to say. It’s the opposite. I have an abundance of questions and thoughts swimming around in the dome, but nothing feels solid or fully formed. I guess this will be an experiment then, to see if I can process in real time. So feel free to watch as I rifle through a pile of junk and sort out the trash from the treasure. Hopefully along the way I’ll unearth some vaguely deep life lesson and then present it to you in my own, charmingly self-deprecating way.
You may have just had the thought, “B, not everything needs to be a lesson.” YES IT DOES! (sorry to yell). And no, everything doesn’t need to be a lesson but in another very real, very true way, yes it does. That’s how my mind makes sense of the world around me. If I’m learning then I’m growing, and if I’m growing then I’m moving forward–getting closer to the kind of person I want to be. So I will try to find meaning in the mundane, because it gives me eyes to see God in the places that feel so painfully human.
Last week I did something profound. Something unprecedented in our world today. Brace yourself. I exited out of all of my open tabs. I force quit chrome. Angels started singing, the skies parted, I saw through space and time. You should try it, it was crazy.
I consistently have 8+ tabs on my computer. Most of them for work, some of them for fun. As I write this, I have 6 open tabs: three are work related, one is shopping, one is my calendar, and the last is this document (sorry, I know you thought I wrote these in a diary with a quill). The first question I ask myself is, why? I have the ability to get every tab back, and yet I cannot bring myself to delete them at the end of the day or even the end of the week. Every tab is a task unfinished.
Much to my dismay, some things are not one-and-done tasks. A project requires revisions and time. A tab can stay open for weeks because the project isn’t completed yet. It lives in my mind until it’s over, and it lives on my browser until then too. I wonder if shutting off everything would help my brain do the same? That’s what I’m searching for–a reprieve from my own thoughts.
My mind is not often blank. Given the fact that I take to writing about trash far too often, this can’t come as much of a surprise. If I had to take a guess, I’d say your mind isn’t often blank either.
We can blame it on the nature of the American lifestyle, the hustle. Sure, do that. But does attaching a potentially harmful habit to a cultural structure normalize it to the point of exonerating ourselves? It’s easy for me to fall prey to that line of thinking. Being busy feels good. (Addendum: being busy feels good until it doesn’t). It’s the illusion of purpose; that purpose being to check things off a list. The hustle culture makes you believe that your value comes from your accomplishments.
I don’t believe that, not in my heart. But I operate as if it’s true. I keep the tabs open as a constant reminder of things left undone. I’m in constant stress due to the threat of failure. Exiting out a tab is my reward for getting the task done. A shot of dopamine gives me an illusion of rest and 7 more tabs laugh quietly, as I jump right into the next thing.
Rest seems like the cure. Unfortunately, that is not my forte. I’m not talking about a work/life balance. I’m talking about the mental labor we exert even after the computer closes and the last slack is sent. Watching 3 episodes of Teen Wolf and writing for hours after work doesn’t scratch the itch of rest. Not because those things aren’t restful to me, but because I haven’t created space between me and the things that weigh heavily on my mind. The tabs look at me even as I write this, reminding me of my to-do’s of tomorrow.
At the end of the day, I am not a collection of checked off task boxes. But I’ve forgotten how to be bored and how to be quiet. I know the things that give me rest and I’m learning that rest doesn’t just happen when you are doing things you love, it happens when you intentionally give yourself room to not be a taskmaster.
Feeling connected to life giving things, makes me feel at home in my own mind. I could list those things out but I don’t need to, the means of rest doesn’t matter. The farther away from stress I get, the more I feel like my most kind, fulfilled, authentic self.
Work is a part of life. Stress is inevitable. I’m learning how to throw the tabs in the trash every day, even the ones I may open up again tomorrow, just as practice. It can feel discouraging to have to keep throwing away the same things over and over (you heard about the pears?). Does practice make perfect? God, I hope not. Being perfect sounds really boring. Practice forms habits and habits provide comfort in repetition, safety even. What would my life look like if I started forming habits that slowed my life down instead of making me efficient? Efficiency is fine, but I would rather be happy. Well, I guess we found the lesson.
Thanks for processing with me. Taking out the trash is more fun with a friend.
Your Trashiest Friend,
B
