For me, this year began with a resolution to simplify, to reduce the noise that I felt was affecting my day. I knew this was something that I wanted to do but until I stumbled upon this Vlog Bothers video, (ironically enough) I had had a hard time putting my goal into words 🙂
John telling his brother Hank about his New Year’s Resolution.
For me though, taking it down a notch revolves around being more selective about the media I choose to consume. You see, I followed all the myriad tangential rabbit holes of thought back to a common connection — needing to know, needing to know everything, and needing to know it now, not later, now.
Until the end of 2022, my morning coffee had been accompanied by one or more audio news sources, all of which claimed to tell me the news I needed to start my day.
But wait, did I actually need the news I was consuming? Was any of it immediately actionable? Or was it simply serving as fuel for existential dread?
So, for a week, near the end of 2022, I kept a simple tally of news, dividing it into columns labeled Who Cares, Interesting, Important But Can’t Act, and Take Action.
Sadly, very few things wound up in the Take Action column. And, if within the next 2 days, I received the same news through other means, I removed it from that list if taking action 2 days later would have been as effective, because obviously I didn’t actually need it to start my day.
I also would remove entries from both Interesting and Important But Can’t Act, for the same reasons. And, at the end of my experiment, it became clear that starting the day by fueling my existential dread truly did not make my life better in any way. I wound up being just as informed about current events without subjecting myself to the daily stew of inertia fodder that is the morning news.
Like anything else addictive, one tends to lean on substitution while cutting back. So, I filled the gap for a while with educational youtube videos from channels like Space Time, and Tom Scott. But, after a while, I cut back there and eventually got to a place where the coffee itself was enough of a moment on its own.
And, before the end of January, that silence made space for something else, thoughts. And those thoughts lead to this attempt at #PostADay journaling, among other things. I chose to attempt to achieve a post a day for a month during the shortest month of the year. It feels like the writing equivalent of Couch to 5K.
So, what have I learned?
For me, without still, quiet, reflective time, I had a harder time getting myself into a place of original creativity. I had been convinced that I needed to actively consume the news daily, but for me, that turned out not to be true. My life is structured in a way where I tend to keep up with important issues by default.
When I journal with a noisy mind, my journaling is a less effective meditation. I bring the global noise with me to the page. That overwhelming darkness doesn’t spur me on, it forces me back, away from the page, to a place where I tend to sit above the journal counting the volume of words and not their content.