Maybe Tomorrow

Maybe one day, I will have the capacity to just go the fuck to sleep. 

Today is not that day. 

My own lack of discipline continually hounds me. The lack of an ability to set out on a course and then follow through on it, or to know that my life would be improved if I only did X or didn’t do Y, is what holds me back the most. Right now I’ve been thinking about my hobbies, much as this sort of seems to be an odd area to gauge this issue. 

I can never just pick up a hobby and stick to it. My creativity seems to always want to be expressed through a new medium every 28 minutes, or I want to pick up a new hobby instead of continually improving on existing ones I already own the equipment for. Granted, I’m young, and it’s perfectly fine to have more than one hobby; in fact, it actually makes me quite glad that at this point, most of my money is spent investing in my various hobbies, which then do not need further spending. 

The problem is that I never invest enough time in them. Over $1,000 in guitars and guitar equipment is sitting under my bed as I scroll guitar subreddits for hours. Yellowstone National Park is 2 miles from me while I scroll through Instagram reels about travelling. 

I wonder if I was cursed with the name “Jack,” as sometimes it feels I am destined to be a Jack of all Trades and Master of None. I do not want this, nor do I believe it to be a worthwhile lifestyle. We all owe it to ourselves to attain mastery at something. Endless potential means nothing if the train never leaves the station. Being a sailor, destined for all ports, means nothing if you never decide which port to arrive at. I become irate with myself whenever I remember that I haven’t picked up a guitar in 3 months, a book in a month, and still haven’t even done that one 10 minute task I know would improve my life if I just did it. 

I am acutely aware that time is the most precious resource any of us have, yet I allow myself to be stuck in an endless cycle of mindlessly scrolling while opportunities for life pass me by, second by precious second. Tomorrow, it seems, is always a better day to be doing what I ought to be doing right now. Tomorrow is a valuable resource, one that offers hope when days are bad. One day, however, tomorrow won’t come. What am I to do then, when all of the things I placed on one tomorrow to-do list after the next can no longer be accomplished, and looking back provides only graphics of football stats I never really cared about, memes that at best made me exhale sharply, and people I’ve never met leading lives I wished I did? 

It’s so difficult to maintain a healthy balance with social media. I want to make posts that are worth sharing to others and looking back on personally, and I enjoy seeing my friends’ updates as well. Then my reptile brain clicks the little magnifying glass, and I find myself sucked into the endless expanse of the explore page, mindlessly erasing the chances I’ve been given to live with the flicking of my thumb. 

I’ve always known this though, and I still haven’t done anything about it. I still average 4 hours of screen time a day. I still snooze my alarms for an hour, sleeping the day away. I still sit in my room on beautiful days, saying “eh, tomorrow will be nice too,” only to make the same mental note when I arrive at tomorrow. 

One day, tomorrow won’t come. And that doesn’t scare me as much as it should. 

The best advice I’ve heard for attaining goals is to define what it means to fail. The idea is that leaving failure vague offers you entirely too much room to convince yourself that you haven’t failed, even as you fall further and further off of the path you’ve set. So how about this: every day I sleep past 10:00 is a failure. Every day I spend even one minute on the explore page is a failure. Every day I don’t pick up a guitar or a book, open a word document, or go on a walk is a failure. Every day I intended on going to the gym, but made an excuse not to, is a failure. Every day I don’t journal is a failure. Every day I don’t express at least one point of gratitude is a failure. 

What it means to succeed is to maintain a life worth living every single day. Life isn’t grand events in between otherwise unimportant chunks of time, but rather it’s what goes on every single moment of every single day. Those grand events are opportunities to bear witness to something that is perhaps beyond life itself, but it’s the day to day that defines whether or not it was all worth it, and is therefore worth getting right. I believe very firmly that showing up and being there, whatever there is, is most of the battle. After that, you just let whatever happens happen, and every now and then you might just get lucky. 

This is something that’s true of anything, but I think photography provides a great example. Wildlife photographers spend weeks, maybe even months, simply just existing in a space and waiting to see what happens, all for one shot of something they might not even have expected to see. Iconic moments come into being as often by a careful lack of planning as they do by a purposeful effort of planning, and it’s important to remember that fact. Just show up and be prepared for anything, don’t let expectation of X let an amazing Y pass you by. 

Admittedly, I’ve never been quite sure how to balance ideas like “let go and let God,” “be still and know that I am God,” or “giving up’s way harder than trying” with the idea that planning still needs to be done. I think the idea is that you need to give yourself the opportunity to be inspired, and then act on that inspiration. Planning should be undertaken to take you to points where you can enjoy that inspiration. Picasso said that inspiration struck him when he was hardest at work, and I think that’s perhaps the idea: you ought to plan time where inspiration can strike, a seemingly paradoxical practice. Blocking out time for reflection or meditation is an example. This time is fully intended to be unplanned, and purposefully so. 

Further, you put time in so that when inspiration or necessity strike, you’ve got the ability to do something with it. Kobe put countless hours of work into putting in “unconscious” performances during big-time games. It’s no use being inspired by a scene if you haven’t got the ability to paint it in the first place, even if you’ve got the scene perfectly captured in your imagination. It’s those hours of discipline that let you have the moments that make it all worth it, that make life worth it; those hours were life, and they let you have that moment of more. 

So, tl;dr, it’s about fucking time I be an adult and do what I have to to achieve success and a life that’ll be worth it. 

I hope this does not come across as a preachy self-help post, and if it does know that I was the target audience who needed to hear it.