Too busy to be bored

I set myself a goal to write a blog post this weekend... and almost didn't find the time.

It's not that I had no time on my hands, it's that I have too much. Too much of my time gets sunk into endless scrolling, researching (many people call it "shopping",) diving headlong into instagram tags, endless trails of comments and rather useless drivel. It was really fun, very draining, and I wasn't bored at all.

That's the problem.

As a kid, I was bored all the time. So I built forts in the woods, I learned photography, I read books, I took up skateboarding, I wrote half-baked adolescent fantasy novels, I mapped the woods behind my house, I build endless successions of better and better lego mechwarrior clones... I made terrible action movies starring my siblings.

I miss being bored. I know the old adage... idle hands and all that... and it's true. The world, the flesh, and the devil can do a lot of harm with too much time and not enough wisdom. What I am realizing is that my new situation is that I am spending so much time consuming that I have no time left to create.

I would like to change that this year, and this meandering post is the first part of that. I'm trying to change my phone homescreen and my habits, paying much less attention to the red dots littering my digital devices with their siren call of "pay attention to meeeee!" and more time with my nose in a book, a pencil in my hand, a camera by my side... and my family with me. Blogging may seem counter-productive, but it may be the last public creative outlet I have that doesn't bombard me with a constant stream of notifications and likes, slowly besieging my heart till it marches in lockstep with the generally approved set of opinions and behaviors. (I've become all to aware of what gets likes on Instagram... and that's not really the thought I want running through my subconscious when I'm taking pictures of my family.)

I can not afford to be distracted any longer. I'm really excited to spend more of my year with purposeful, boring margin... lots of room for magic and memories.

Further Reading:

Bonus: What I've been reading recently:


Changelog
  • 2022-06-08 11:31:29 -0500
    Rename articles

  • 2020-11-06 19:51:08 -0600
    Fix/remove broken images

    I took my instagram private, just to use for family.

  • 2020-06-18 14:26:02 -0500
    Move everything to CST

    Don't know why I didn't do that before. It caused _no_ end of
    problems.

  • 2018-10-02 13:23:58 -0500
    Adjust tags in posts

  • 2018-01-13 19:36:56 -0600
    Article: Too Busy To Be Bored