01 October, 2015

In Honor of You Three

san diego walking

✍ CURRENTLY WRITING FROM: SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

Sometimes, ten minutes of pressure is all you need.  Regardless of what your goal is, if there is pressure to be done in ten minutes, you are closer to achieving it than if you had set a more impossible goal.  For example, I've just woken up and I almost rolled back into the covers.  But I remembered the distant call of this space in the internet, and I remembered that I've vowed to myself to write for ten minutes every single day.  Ten minutes doesn't seem like enough time for a person who plans to make writing their life-long career, but it's a silly kind of reverse psychology, see?  Ten minutes actually is enough: it's lengthier writing than I would have written had I not even bothered to write at all that day.  Which I don't, sometimes.  But by the time I start writing, I tell myself not to look at the stopwatch for a while.  Usually, when I do look at the watch, we're seven minutes in, so I continue and don't look at it again for a long period of time.  As ten minutes rolls in, however, I've become too immersed in what I've written to stop at this point, causing me to write longer than ten minutes.  You and I, we both win.

Sometimes I do stop at ten minutes and that's okay, I think, because sometimes you need to fall under pressure and tell rules to go to hell because you don't have time for this today.

I've always told my closest friends that they should attempt having friends that are significantly older than them and friends that are significantly younger than them.  These are friends whose wisdom I cherish the most.  I have friends my age, and I have friends that are two years younger than me (meaning, they've just begun college), so we're all on the same platform of experience.  We're all learning together.  Having adult friends and even young people as friends is very powerful.  (I would like to point out that I checked my stopwatch just now and it said that I've been writing for seven minutes and ten seconds.)  Adult friends have a sense of authority that they've received from their years of experience, so they don't let you off easy while caring about you in a motherly way.  Young friends are still excited about the things you've forgotten to care about years ago, and they add a spark of naiveté to life, keeping you on your toes.  There's also a pressure to not be as pessimistic around them (after all, they're children, how could you possibly think it'd be okay to bring their energy levels down to yours?), so you inevitably became a little more optimistic.  Which makes me wonder, why do we feel like children are stupid and have not developed any wisdom?  I don't know the answer yet, but I feel it's because of our human brains' need to create problems and complicate things, because it gets off solving them.  There's the universal wisdom that every problem has a solution, and I'm pretty sure adult problems are much stupider (if you try really hard to look at it this way and it you're feeling humble), so children know how to solve problems and how to discard them the quickest way, but they just hold much more gravity to adults, so they have trouble feeling so blasé about problems.

As always, this post ends as abruptly as it would if we were having a conversation in person.


me reading the goldfinch