Hey you know what counts as both resting and productive in furtherance of your life goals?
Meditation.
Several times in the past few weeks, I’ve caught myself in a quandary wondering what I can do, but then realized, “oh. I can meditate.”
look. you have a lot on your mind. Letting that shit process is good for you. And you process it by sitting comfortably and letting your thoughts wander while you mindfully sit back and commit to
a b s o l u t e l y n o t
acting upon ANY of them right now.
This is their chance to stretch their proverbial legs and get some fresh air. You’ve taken them to the park. This isn’t anywhere but a park. This period of time is not for engaging tasks or running errands or indulging vices.
Focus on the quiet things. The sound and feeling of the air moving through the room, entering and leaving your lungs. Or just … your own heartbeat if you can actually feel it. Or just counting without a goal in mind. If you lose track, it’s ok. Losing track is actually the point.
Listen, fam, you were going to waste the time anyway. Committing to this is the opposite of wasting it because you made a choice. At least until something you definitely do want to do pops up. As long as you ‘can’t decide’, default to this.
What will eventually happen is your thoughts will come and go and you might notice that you don’t create them. Your brain is just generating noise and attempting to extrapolate it arbitrarily into various forms. Those forms are driven by your experiences, especially the more recent and/or intense ones. But you didn’t CHOOSE to ‘have thoughts’. The thoughts show up all by themselves. What YOU choose, as the observer process, is whether to entertain those thoughts.
This is how you access your brain’s proverbial ‘dev console’, and how you tweak the ‘settings’: your attention reinforces neural patterns. If you can mindfully select which patterns you wish to reinforce and which ones you will neglect and allow to atrophy, you also tune which kinds of concepts are more likely to show up more often.
everybody should really do this more often. it has helped me get a grip in some very wild times.