When you're trying to restructure your everything, you have to start thinking hard about why your habits were what they were. I recently read an article, from Cracked.com of all places, and it inspired me to turn over a new leaf. Funnily enough, the leaf remains the same leaf it was before, a fact that seems so straightforward that I wonder if the original phrase is conjuring the wrong image in my head.
Regardless.
I wrote down the five things that I want to be my priorities. I listed learning, creativity, purpose, youth, and friends/family. When I say "youth", by the by, I'm not talking about maintaining my own, but influencing kids. Finding programs to be a part of. Hell, STARTING some if I don't find any to my liking. "Purpose" is a kind of short-hand for me; I want my actions, preferably all of them, to be done with meaning and intent behind them. Granted that we all choose all of our actions, but it's so easy to do things by HABIT rather than with intent. Eating well, good hygiene, a clean house: these are all part of what I mean by "purpose".
So, I wrote those down, and the point behind doing so is to structure my days accordingly. Currently, by the pattern of my recent days, my priorities have been YouTube, Facebook, reading, eating, and video games. While getting some other things done, those have been the focus of my time. So, time and past to make my days reflect my priorities.
Easier said than done.
I don't intend to simply say things like "no more Youtube!" because frankly, I do have fun with it. Not when I surf from link to link and spend hours clicking "just one more video," but I do often enjoy what I watch. So this afternoon, I went online while I ate a belated lunch. This led to, at one point, a great deal of time spent on the archives of a favorite webcomic. I looked up, realized it was after four, and realized I wasn't sure when I'd last moved. Time to stop reading. I got up and did other things, but it's still easy to drift into something else. And then into something else. The article I read talked about how no improvements will be made, we will DO NOTHING unless we have motivation. A proverbial gun to our heads. That gun is self-provided, though. It's not immediately there in my forefront brain. I have to train it to be, I guess.
Tell you what I did do, though: I went up to my alma mater and wandered around for a few hours, helping the freshmen move in. I walked, I talked, I advised, I answered questions, I shlepped a great deal of luggage, and I made a few new connections. If I can be, at any point in their time here, a boon, then that is something I will happily be. It's a priority of mine.
