Thoughts While Looking West to Minneapolis
If you place your chin on a windowsill and contemplate the land stretching out from you and the sky curving down to meet it, you’ll notice things you never noticed before. This slow down in your frenetic pace illustrates planes making white pencils in the sky and the clouds drifting past. It’s during times such as these that I realize my ability to occupy my time with the most simple of activities is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. I find myself running away from my perfectionism into a purgatory of still meditation. My problem is that a job half-started is a job not completed to my standards. While this means I never stop a project in the middle, it prevents me from taking breaks along the way or even starting. It’s all or nothing for my mind, a tendency I would desperately like to overcome. I’d like to study for an hour and break for 15 minutes early in the day, rather than study for three hours straight at the end.
Youth seems to preclude prioritization in the most sinister ways - inspiring quotes fool you into thinking that only being young once means only doing nothing at all once in your life. I just want balance, and I know how to achieve it - but it is as the philosophy I study states: one can know the path to walk yet be prevented by incontinence (paraphrased Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics).
This might be a battle of the appetitive. Once my appetite to succeed overcomes my appetite for short term enjoyment of things that could be put off, then I will be unstoppable. There has got to be a way to encourage that Success Appetite so that I may stand upright again.