Tag: Time management

Myself, Random

Clutter

Sanjay Sabarwal
Clutter Nutters
Clutter Nutters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Clutter. All around I see piles of clutter.  First, and always the mental.  The master To DO list that never seems to go down.  My creativity at adding all my thoughts onto a piece of paper does provide some relief, yet some items just languish there for ages.  It’s as if I hope time’s dust will bury them, and I won’t have to do them.  There are several I have been avoiding for a long time.  I know donating old clothes from my overflowing closet would relieve me, yet I hesitate to go there.  I realize that my library needs to be organized, and I need some breathing room in my work space.  Currently. I am typing gently so as not to disturb the stacks of the books I have placed all around me so they don’t fall on me. Yeah, the height of irony, me buried under words.  Everywhere. I see clutter in my life.  Words fill inside me, and I don’t make room for new ones, instead I push them down under more unsaid words and actions. 

 

Behind me, I sense my pacing dog who anxiously, but patiently, waits for me to take her on her daily walk. Back and forth, I heard the skitter of her feet.  Each day is a choice of actions.  Each day. I can remove or reduce the clutter or I can take care of some other pressing problem.  As I type this. I wonder if I should take the garbage cans in first or ensure Bella can get her morning walk in.  Each clear moment has become about decisions that make my day. I resist the pathological need to check my Facebook account or the FML website. Each passing minute, I make decisions that create my day for me.  And so lies the dust in my life. Some days, the dust seems to far spread that I don’t even feel like trying.  Then there are the other days where I begin to pick up something, and the whole weight of what lies ahead feels so suffocating that I rather just aimlessly roam over Spotify and keep creating playlists.

 

Each moment is a decision, and some days are just spent in whimsical searching of my past. The To Do list glares at me, and it becomes part of the clutter in my life.  Each time I glance at it, the enormity of it just gets to me. It has gotten so bad that I have been put taking my meds as part of my life.  I am drowning myself in to do items, and it hits me that I have cluttered thinking as well. So the past weeks, I have been doing Morning Pages from The Artist’s Way, and suddenly even the smallest thoughts are written, and I begin to see patterns.  Sadness and anger and regret at the thing I needed or wanted them to be. So much regret, so much longing for how I want things to be.  So I put the thoughts down on paper, and suddenly I feel a bit lighter. The clutter no longer seems suffocating. 

 

I move the books, and the words are no longer threatening to bury me.  One day at a time.  One thing at a time. 

 

 

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Come Alive

Sanjay Sabarwal

Come Alive by Jonathan Mead
Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

(Author: Jonathan Mead)

I am in the rare position in life where I can say that I would still be doing what I am doing now if I had a week to live with the exception of a few things I wish I was doing more (traveling more, reading more, trying out new activities such as camping), and I realize that I love where I work, I have the partner I love but, (isn’t there always one but?) I am missing some part of my old self, and that’s who I was when I ran Ziba Music with my father and the fact that I was always open to new experiences.  I see now that I want to reconnect with old friends more, old activities even more and limit some of the new people I hang around with only to do things I truly love with my partner.  I would say that I am at 75% in terms of not changing my week but would like at least 2 days to be spent with old friends, doing an event and perhaps traveling. My current goals are getting me to that ideal 100% as just this weekend, I reconnected with some dear friends of mine, spent quality time with her and my family and finally got to do a BBQ at a place (for me, it was the ideal weekend).  Now just gotta make sure I have more weekends like this!

 

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Trust 30 Prompts: Catching up online (A Blog Post)

Sanjay Sabarwal
Title page of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)
Image via Wikipedia

So I got a bit lazy in terms of posting my prompts but somehow the defensiveness side of me wanted to make them public so whoever reads my blogs knows that I am not a quitter or one who does not follow through so here are my prompts that I have putting on random documents for the last few days.

Post-it Question by Jenny Blake

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.
My post it note that’s planted on my laptop was:  HOW DO I GET PASSIONATE ABOUT WRITING REGULARLY?  Today is 48 hours later, and I keep remembering the time when I took the class Revisiting the Muse, and it was during those days as well as her Cancer treatment that I was really, truly into the experience of writing because it was my only way of truly expressing myself.  Whenever I veer away from the path of using writing as my ultimate expression tool, I resort to pettiness, day-to-day nostalgia and somehow feeling full of this emotional gunk that makes me not even like myself really.  So what was it about those times? A writing schedule, and a morning one at that.  I don’t know when I turned into a morning person but the last few years, what I have in common with my dad is truly scary.  Nowadays, he is up at 530 and in bed b 9pm.  Ok, so I am not that bad, but I was waking up around 730 and in the quiet of the morning, when I had no distractions, I would pour out my soul.  But some silly comments that I was always in the other room, I took to mean that I shouldn’t be writing when the complaint was not about the other room but about disappearing with no comment and not spending quality time. So I stopped the writing schedule, and although I did not immediately feel it, my writing has suffered and the past few classes, I have merely trudged through the assignments, cutting and pasting from older essays not realizing exactly why my creativity had dried up. Now I see it.  I need that morning outlet, I need to keep reading, I need to stay intellectually stimulated.

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