One Week.

So its Monday, and it has been about a week since I started this blog, and about a week since I made the commitment to this new way of living. I mentioned earlier that I had a strategy, but never explained it. I will do so now.
The strategy was to spend no more than 24 hours a week doing all those distracting things that waste my time. Watching movies, reading books that are just entertaining, aimlessly wandering the internet, watching TV, reading webcomics, sleeping in, etc. That comes out to about 3 hours, 25 minuets a day. The rest of the time I would have to spend working (at my job), sleeping no more then 8 hours, eating good foods, doing good work (art, food gathering, etc), moving towards my goals and dreams... I think you get the idea.
And after trying this strategy out, I don't think it will work. I think it is too lax, I am very sorry to say. Too much room to spin around, doing almost nothing, and not counting it towards the 3&1/2 hour daily limit. I have too much room to stagnate.

I need to set small, manageable goals for myself, every week. Nothing big, but some step, something to move me along the way. Keep myself placing one foot in front of the other on the good red road. It will also give me lost to blog about (not that I am in any way running out of material.

A friend and fellow blogger David Scrimshaw made a brief comment when I announced I was starting a blog.
"I just subscribed on my google reader.

If you're not just some flash in the pan I may even blogroll you.

But just so you know, you don't have to endure any more optional pain in order to keep my attention."

Upon reading, I immediately felt a snap of indignation. Of course I am not going to be a flash in the pan! This will last, my commitment will last! But then I realized that his statement was entirely justified. The one about being a flash in the pan, I mean. This could very well have been, and could very well still be. Yet I do not believe it will. I want this blog to live, so I will make it live.

So I will make another commitment, and first I want to thank some people who have helped this blog, and me.

Thank you, David Scrimshaw, for grounding me with your comment. Thank you, Alexander, for all your love and support and insights. Thank you, Keir, for your support, caring, brilliant ideas, and laughs. Thank you, Manon, for your support, encouragement, and giving birth to me (that probably hurt a lot more then getting a tooth drilled). Thank you, Woodsy, for your rigorous devotion to commenting on my blog, I felt heard and cared about as a result. Thank you, Lilia and Ady (who really, really should meet each other), for your comments and attention. Thank you, Ashly Colton, for your awesome blog, your compliment, your attention, and for sharing my blog with others. Thank you, Zander, for doing the work to write this blog. Thank you, Haida Gwaii, for being my home, and for nurturing and sustaining me. Thank you, everyone who reads this, for your attention.

I commit to continue working to live in accordance with the truth of my heart, to set manageable goals to work towards this, to maintaining this blog, to not wasting anyone's time with junk content on this blog, and to be happy.

This week, I will write send a number of letters I should have sent weeks ago. This includes, but is not limited to, letters to my Uncle Brian, my Grandfather, and to the government of Canada so I can get a new passport. That is my goal for this week.

Foundations.

Around the beginning of June, a lovely young woman walked into my work, and we briefly spoke. As soon as we begin talking, a rare thing happened- I stopped spinning around in my head. I was suddenly grounded. As our brief conversation continued, she was able to, as Neal Stephenson would say, condense meaning from the vapour of nuance. In short, she was someone I wanted to, at the very least, have as a friend. We never exchanged any proper form of contact information, but she knew where I worked, and I knew the name of the sailboat she was working as a cook on that summer. So yesterday, when the captain of that sailboat came into work, I quickly jotted my name, email and phone number on a slip of paper for him to pass on to her. He didn’t mind at all. I also wrote a brief note on the paper.
I would like to chat with you again some time. Drop me a line anytime.
I told a lie there. I would love to chat with her again, but I lost my nerve, I wrote “like,” instead.

Sometimes, a little rot makes its way through the tooth's defenses, and starts to eat away at the soft and vulnerable dentin. From the outside, everything looks normal, but inside the tooth is decaying, all through its centre. Then the enamel crumbles away, and suddenly the nerve is exposed. This happened to me recently, both literally and metaphorically.

An old book on the shelf tells me that decay of the "4-6" tooth represents being "self-defeating."

I can understand that. I've done my share of self-sabotaging. Who hasn't? But for the past little while, being self-defeating has seemed like a lifestyle. An inescapable lifestyle, for in the past I have tied, and failed, to break away from it.

It hurt- both the way of life, and the tooth. I had the tooth drilled and filled. I refused anesthetic. I hurt. It was the greatest pain I have ever lived. By far. Every pain I believed to have had experienced is negligible by comparison. Before the process was over, I asked for anesthetic. By that point, in a room cold enough to have had me shivering before the drilling started, my whole body was sweating. I could feel it running down the backs of my legs. While the dentist, a very gentle man, was working, it was all I could do to remember to take breaths, and not move my jaw. I was told the decay was on the nerve, and the nerve itself needed to be drilled or scraped. That really, really hurt.

I took more pain then I ever imagined I was capable of withstanding. One of the few coherent thoughts I could hold during the drilling was that the pain I am experiencing is the pain of being self-defeating.

And I've had enough of it. Enough of not living the life I was born to live, the life that makes me happiest. Enough of being afraid of doing the good work enjoined in living in such a life, and enough of placing highest value on wallowing in the distractions I picked up along the way to keep myself complacent.

So now, taking the lesson of the pain as a milestone, I commit to honour myself. I will no longer let my life drift away without purpose. What purpose? Stay tuned. This blog is an attempt to chronicle joy, pain, and life experienced in accordance to the truth of my heart.