Time
There's only so much time in a day. My tracking system for "time" in 2023 was a summary of all of the activity categories I tracked. It's represented on the right as an average score for the week.
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The first few week of February was pretty exceptional even if the activities I was doing were not. I was feeling good about starting a new job and was a busy little bee. If I was giving me a report card for that week (I guess that's what this is) it would be straight As for cleaning my apartment, doing paperwork, getting exercise, and being generally social and agreeable with everyone.
The first week of December was a low point. I was definitely not with it. I reported a lot of cranky behavior, being too lazy to do anything, fighting with friends and family, and not feeling especially motivated. It is weird how its the same amount of hours in each week but I get drastically different amounts of things done.
Defragmenting
There is the way I would like tasks and time to work, and then there is the reality of the world we live in, which is continuously engineering new ways to interrupt us . Plus, as a lady approaching my halfway point in life, I'm honestly very tired. I need little breaks in which I do nothing, eat a snack, or disassociate while staring at the metal stamping machine in the industrial lot outside my apartment.
Permanent vs Impermanent
I have a minor fascination with consistency. I think the things we do the longest and most often have a way of shaping us. The things that feel most important now may not be here in a year. I thought about my tenancy with different parts of my life. The big three (job, relationship, and home) are all only about a year old. I have more of a relationship with people in my local coffeeshop than I do with my current coworkers. It's weird, the things that end up being the most reliable in your life.
You Get What You Get
I am kind of an obsessive person. Sometimes I get caught up thinking about something that happened. It's usually a social interaction that either went badly awry or was confusing to me in some way. I re-visit these moments and mull over them. And then I obsess. Was I being too rude? Did I say the wrong thing? Does this person hate me? I find I can also obsess over good moments, standout memories of having a good time or a close connection that seem absent in my life now. In both cases, I feel like I'm searching for a clue in the Now for a look at the Later. Often I have to pull myself back and look at the big picture. I might prefer to spiral on the extreme moments as I experience them, but the overall pattern usually tells a different story. The outliers are emotionally outsized, but they aren't usually predictive of what my experience will be later.
