A moment for day 27

Posted retroactively.

My most recent post left me with the question: Is creating routines that bring me balance and position me to find moments of joy around me a futile endeavor, since I may eventually do dumb human things and choose to spend all waking hours listening to comedy podcasts while playing mobile games? As much as I want the steadfast answer to that question to be: “No!”, there is definitely a pattern of my behavior and possibly the behavior of other people that needs to be considered. I found myself thinking about last fall semester, my junior year. I was planning on embarking on a very difficult season filled with 3 jobs, 18.5 credit hours, and a new found desire to not ruin my life. In an attempt to juggle those goals and commitments, I made a schedule that factored in time to study for each class, time to socialize, time to shower, time to sleep, and time to get ready in the morning and settle down in the night. Everything was planned, down to the different steps of morning and night routines thats I believed would help me survive the semester ahead instead of getting dragged through the finish line. Truth is the routines were great when I followed them. I felt like I could make it through the semester if I kept it up, and I did for a little more than a month. Eventually, the time spent on the routines did not seem to outweigh the chance of finishing an assignment or “relaxing” by binging youtube videos or Netflix series. So, I stopped.

It has taken me a long time to recognize that the reason I stopped was because the closer I got to the goal post, the less I felt I knew why I was doing it. It didn’t matter if I had self-discipline and self-compassion and whatnot if by the end of the semester, everything was just going to be the same old thing and the next semester would look just like this one. I dreaded “the cycle” because when I thought of myself in it, I thought of myself as a part of it. I didn’t see myself growing or changing if everything else stayed the same, so there was really no reason to put all this effort in. Additionally, I didn’t see myself growing or changing, period. Even in the moment I am writing this, I am really unsure what “my best self” looks like, or what “the person I hope to become” has as their attributes. This all feeds into the nihilism and conservation of energy and lack of self-compassion that make self-discipline seem fruitless, in turn, making routines aimed at growth seem infeasible.

So now I am left with a set of new questions:

Who do I want to become?

What am I putting in the effort for?

Why do I want to happy?

This may look like a step backwards, but really I think it is a step I have been ignoring. If I am going to carry what I have learned from this trip into my life back home, these are questions I need to answer. The answers will give me a reason to have these routines, to sacrifice the time and the energy for these practices. The fact that these questions scare me so much means they are important. Things that challenge us are worth it.