Beating my drum

I was sitting in a cafe just now eating brunch and thinking about what to do with my life.

Actually, let me segue into breakfast for a second. I believe breakfast should be the largest, most intentionally awesome, and least rushed meal of the day. None of which is true in the west. Many of us skip breakfast; I’ve certainly done my fair share of that when I was working, which is why I started the trend of eating when I got to work, but it’s still invariably rushed because I always felt a bit guilty about it. The problem I think with rushing in the morning is that it sets you up to be rushed for the day, not consciously having time to care for yourself, your intentions are all up in the air and belong to whoever and wherever you’re rushing to get to. Even when I did stop and make breakfast in the morning, it was by necessity something quick, usually not sustaining, and eaten far too quickly. To me the morning should be a time to prepare yourself properly for the day, for meditation, some kind of gentle exercise to wake your body up and your appetite going, then a big and healthy meal to get your body on track and metabolism regulated properly (not too much sugar, plenty of fibre, vitamins, salt if the weather is hot, in the end I think it really depends on how you’re feeling, but it’s the best time to tune into what your body actually wants to eat because it’s likely the one time of the day it actually needs food after not eating for 10 hours or so). Then I think it’s important to sit for 10 minutes or so and let it all settle. Then is a good time to walk out the front door, feeling relaxed and in control of your life, and go and tackle whatever needs to be done. Unfortunately that seems to mean I don’t leave the house until around 12. So I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work in the morning again. Unless I seriously rearrange my life habits so I can get up between 4 and 6 and start meditating then (which is apparently the best time for some reason, I’ve no idea why, but there is something a bit special about the world when you get up then). Then I think dinner should really be the smallest and probably not eaten after 8pm. I’ve heard that around 30% of your body’s energy goes into digestion, which makes sense to me because if I eat too late I don’t feel rested the next day. Whereas if I eat early, or at least only eat something light like noodle soup with broth if I’m eating it later, then I wake up feeling much more rested and my guts feel better.

So anyway, back to my thoughts on my life. I believe what I’m doing over here is commonly called seeking, and you actually meet a surprising number of people doing it. It seems to be what some people do when they reach a certain age and don’t really feel like the world is as it should be for whatever reason. But we don’t really know WHAT it should be; just that it shouldn’t be how it is. So we seek. I recently read a book called Manhood by an Australian psychologist (which I would recommend to everybody of any gender). In this book he had a proverb of men who aren’t sure of some aspect of their life going off into the mountains by themselves and banging a drum until the solution becomes clear. Obviously he doesn’t mean we all need a drum and a wooden lodge somewhere, but I certainly know what he means. I suppose it appeals to me because its wording speaks to a fairly tribal and primal element of myself (and I’ve no doubt that was his intention). I think this seeking that some of us do is a modern day version of this kind of “spirit journey” or whatever you want to call it. We no longer have shamans or wise women to tell us to go and climb some mountain and sit on top, and we (or at least I) don’t have the blind faith that I’ll find the answer there even if did climb it (which is perhaps a shame, l think life would be much easier that way, blind faith seems to have a lot of power for those who are able to do it). The problem with seeking while travelling is that there are so many distractions, and you’re never really alone, so it’s probably an inefficient version of the “spirit journey”. But on the flip side you gain a lot of other very important experience and cultural mingling which IS thought provoking and challenges your way of life, so maybe it all evens out.

So anyway there I was “banging my drum” over fruit salad, eggs, toast, and amazing coffee, and thinking about the things I like doing. As I’ve already said I don’t like rushing to work every day, or even some days, so I don’t know that I feel like ever working 9-5 again unless I can reorganise my life to deal with it (unlikely to happen in the city).

I do enjoy programming, a lot. It’s one of my creative outlets, but that’s also sort of a problem. It stops being nearly such a creative outlet when I have to do it every day for other people or to some kind of schedule. I like to play with it, I like to program on the cutting edge of my understanding of the field, but that doesn’t really fit with business even though I personally learn much more when I program that way. When I’m making something I enjoy I can program myself into oblivion for 12 hours a day, skipping all of my meals until my knees are shaky and I’m so stupid from low blood sugar that I can barely form a loop construct. Which is very bad, but at least it shows how much I love it. So I would like to work out how to program and make money from it without losing my enjoyment of it.

I enjoy sewing and other physically constructive things, but couldn’t see myself doing either all the time. They both stretch my brain in fun mathematical ways, but there’s a lot of tedium in the middle.

I really enjoy socialisation which is one reason I’m not sure I want to be an engineer. My social skills withered at ACS, which is no reflection on the people there who are great, but social skills take practice like anything else and I just wasn’t getting enough and that made me really unhappy. So I’ve considered trying cafe work or something similar, which pays me to be social and might also let me structure my life closer to the way I like it. This would also give me spare time to spend on programming projects, which hopefully might make me some money. Either way I know that social skills are very important to me and they take practice, so whether I get paid to practice, or pay someone else to do drama courses or whatever, it has to be part of my life.

I also want to write fiction one day. I’ve thought this since I was in my late teens, although I’m aware again that this would take LOTS of practice. But there’s no better time to start practicing then now. Actually I do write (as you may have noticed, quite prolifically at times :-P ), both my own diary (or this blog when my pen runs out of ink), and random pieces of fiction which never get finished and never see the light of day. But it’s quite fun. I write mostly for myself, in the same way that I sketch sometimes or paint. But then I also feel that writing for other people is much more fun than for myself. Just as showing a sketch to people can be fun. It seems natural to want to share these things, as personal as they sometimes are. So I think that someday I would like to try and publish a book. That can wait and be built upon as I write other random things and gain life experience. You’ve no idea how hard it is to write confidently about things that you actually don’t understand. Like how good somebody is at playing chess for instance, unless you’re a chess master can you really write about what it’s like? What if you make a mistake, somebody somewhere will pick up on it.

And yet again I also have urges to run away from civilisation and buy a patch of dirt somewhere and have a cute cottage with stone walls, a massive kitchen, and no TV, where I can grow veges in the garden and maybe keep a cow and chickens so I can make cheese and yoghurt and cakes and omelettes filled with fresh picked aromatic herbs. And then butterflies, small birds, and people I like could come and live with me and we could have cuddle puddles and cook amazing food and feel a little bit sad as the world we were born into dies a slow and painful death. Hopefully by that stage we will have planted enough trees around our house to keep the air clean, and be high enough on a mountain that we won’t be under water, and Google will have uploaded all the information in the world into satellites so that future civilisations don’t make the same mistakes and so that we can still access Wikipedia to help resolve arguments. Yeah, that actually sounds pretty good. Hopefully the butterflies and small birds find us before they all die. But (only slightly) more seriously, I was thinking I might like to WWOOF my way around Oz, because I really want to see more of our amazing country. That would lower my living expenses to almost nil, and I could STILL program in my spare time, and I spent half my time growing up on a farm so I reckon I’d probably manage. Plus I’d still be meeting people from other countries and getting new viewpoints and getting my socialisation fix. The cottage can come later.

And then come children. Do I ever want children? A friend of mine once told me that she wasn’t sure she wanted to bring children into this world, she wasn’t sure it was an ethical choice, although I think, like me, she didn’t yet know. (Oh shit, I just wrote another massive segue on education, but I really should stay on topic so I deleted it). And there are biological things going on in our bodies, especially with girls it seems, that make us crave children. I guess it’s not something I can say for certain until it happens or never. But I bring this up because I sometimes feel that I’m being irresponsible by throwing life and good careers into the wind just to see what else there is. Jumping off cliffs just to see how I land. I do think children need stability (and a lot of other things), and money, although fairly unnecessary to raise kids in Australia as my parents proved, still makes stability much easier to provide. So am I being irresponsible? Perhaps I should just knuckle down and get some money under my belt, whether I have children or not it’ll make life easier later. But then I come back to reality and the fact that money doesn’t actually exist (as a financial adviser I met recently who supports himself from the stock market said). (Oh shit, I just went on another massive rant about my perception of the stupidity of money, the faults capitalism and communism, and internet censorship in a supposedly liberal democracy, you guys are lucky I’ve got my relevance filter on today).

Anyway, that’s got to be enough for today, it’s far larger than I intended and I didn’t even write about what I meant to in the first place, storytelling in: literary fiction, pen and paper role playing games, and computer games. Comparisons between mediums, my personal enjoyment of them, and how I think it’s important for development and creative expression.

Am I ever going to run out of random shit to talk about? I’ve no idea. I’m sorry if you just don’t care, I try to separate posts into ‘travel’ related ones and ‘random shit I’m thinking about’ ones, so you can just tune into what you’re interested in.