Focus

Like a wobbly projector, I slip in and out of it. It's a firework igniting an inch away from my face, a white-hot burst of light blinding and burning, that fades to smoke as quick as it lit. An attention span like I'm a prizefighter who just took the last punch of the night. Missed calls and irate voicemails, bills past due and I don't even know what they are. Focus. I slip in and out of it.

To get to this sentence, you read over roughly a day's work. I started this post about this time yesterday. In between I: took a final exam, gave a presentation in Spanish, did someone else's Spanish homework, played Max Payne 2 a whole shitload, started reading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, flirted with girls in my class, flirted with girls in my phone, slept, shit, and worked my way through a couple thousand breaths, among other things.

The enemy is within.

I get this ants-in-my-pants feeling whenever I sit down to write a post or do my homework or anything else strictly "productive". It's like trying to stare at the sun, you just have to look away. I can't work on one thing at a time because I have this irresistible, irrepressible urge to do stuff. I can't stop reading, which makes doing work on an internet-connected computer impossible. My weird mind wanders from topic to topic, leaving in its wake a trail of half-eaten apples--napkin sketches, one-page book ideas, to-do lists pockmarked with eleventeen neat (if empty) little checkbox squares. My mind is impossible. If I could invent a Jack jack and plug a set of headphones directly in my brain, it would be like listening to a hyped-up five-year-old switching all the radio stations in the car fast as humanly possible, faster even.

The enemy is in your head.

I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, but I was born in a state of information paralysis and stayed that way. The downsides can be vicious. I'm sorry I forgot to call the company about refunding that thing, but I just realized that Baby Fratelli is in the key of G so I had to sit down and tab it out. I would have remembered to come to your thing, but somebody else asked me if I was free the same night and I said yes because I wasn't thinking. I can be insensitive, I will be forgetful, and I am prone to selfishness when not paying attention. And also when paying attention. So I often end up breaking promises, which leads people to not be able to take me seriously, which is why I'm still in college wrestling with bullshit instead of already being out there, doing.

My enemy is me. Your enemy is you. It's not money, time, or mistakes. It's not your job, your government, or someone else's religion. As Ryan Holiday put it, "Let's not kid ourselves, there is more to good and bad than just perception. It's not honest to pretend like you have total control over your emotions. We scientifically do not. You do, however, have the ability to create perspective. Almost nothing takes away your ability to inject that into the situation. So use it."

"Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone--those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the 'what' is in constant flux, the 'why' has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us--a chasm whose depths we cannot see."
- Marcus Aurelius