(Pandemic Diary - day 182)

From my journal: 27 August 2020 (Thursday)

I just spent maybe 10 minutes engaged in something I’m not sure what to call.  I guess it’s a different kind of meditation, different from the Headspace version of mindfulness training I’ve most recently spent time with (“most recently” meaning for the past couple years).

What I used to call it is “daydreaming” and while that’s not a great description, it’s the best word I’m coming up with right now.  Whatever you call it, it’s a valuable, even precious activity that I’ve not allowed myself to do very much of for a very long time.  I think I should make a conscious effort to change that.

The basics of it are that you get comfortable — and usually that means lying on your back, probably with your knees bent, maybe with something (like your hands) under your head, sprawled out on the floor, or a picnic table, or the roof of your car, or on the grass or a friendly boulder — and you let your mind drift.

You don’t do the mindfulness thing of focusing on your breath and trying to let all the thoughts slip by without engagement.  Instead, you do whatever you want with your mind, follow it in whatever direction it wants to take you.  If thinking about something that comes up feels right, you do that, you can engage.

And if you find yourself without much thought, if the only thing is a fascination with the pattern of plaster on the ceiling or the shapes of the clouds as they drift by or the swaying of the branches and fluttering of the leaves above you, that’s fine, too (you might just drift yourself into mindfulness after all).

Or it might just be an interlude between thoughts (which it usually is, at least for me), and that’s fine, too.  This is playtime for your mind, no-pressure time, recess.  And I think it’s powerful and restorative, an important counterbalance for all the time we spend in a state very different from that.

I just realized that I probably used to do more of this, and now I have replaced much of that time with the insidious habit of web-surfing.  I suspect there’s a direct correlation between the rise of one and fall of the other.  And one of them is an important and redeeming activity, while the other is just a trap that sucks you in and spits you out an hour later (if you’re resolute or lucky) with little to show for it.  I emerge from a daydreaming session refreshed and invigorated.  I’m spit out from a browsing session feeling depleted and full of self-loathing.

What to do about it?  Keep fighting the fight, stay conscious of the way you use your time, maybe intentionally set the urge to jump on FB as a trigger to lay the phone aside, lie back, and stare off into space.

Browsing and doom-scrolling aren’t the only culprits in the demise of the daydream, of course.  There’s also the work ethic, the feeling that time not spent working or actively recreating is time wasted.  Get things done, get caught up, produce things, work harder to do better — that drive is an important part of me, and regardless of the fact that I know both intellectually and from experience that things like daydreaming (and yes, meditation, and listening to music, and playing music, and a bunch of other “non-productive” activities) are truly, deeply beneficial, I still feel guilty when I “indulge” in them.  I know that’s wrong.  I know that it is no more indulgent than stopping to eat is, or going for a run, or for that matter, breathing.

Knowing that, I was about to ask why it’s so hard to allow myself to do these things on a frequent and regular basis.  But I know why, I’ve just said why.  The much more pertinent question is “how do I change this?”.

I guess one way would be to make it part of my job, to treat it as work, as something I am supposed to be doing, as an accomplishment to measure.  But it’s hard to track, and I don’t want or need yet another thing to track.

So I think my better approach, at least right now, for this current me, is to just keep reminding myself of my own intentions.

Intentionality is the key.  Doing this more frequently because I know that I’ve chosen to, because this is what I want, because I remind myself regularly that this is what I want.  And so doing these things at least marginally more often because of that intentionality (rather than because I’ve put it on autopilot by entrusting it to a habit-tracker or a streak).

Yes, there is power in keeping track and streaking and all the other number-based things and the various autopilots I use with my running (and to a lesser extent with my writing), but that is not how I want to do everything.  And having tried those approachs on this kind of thing and come up short, I think this other approach is worth trying.  Intentionality, and regular reminders and clarifications of what I want to be intentional about.