I like my job.  For some reason when I see topics about the line above I always see people start by how they hate their job.  For me my job pays the bills and the people I work with are good folk so I’m happy with that.  If I could do the things I love and get paid that would be awesome.  However, nobody would pay me to take bad photographs, and certainly not for playing video games.  Heck I don't even know what I do if whatever I wanted would pay the bills.  So anyway the job is not the issue I don't think.

It’s just time and productivity (not sure productivity is the right word).  I don’t much care that there is a hole in the pantry ceiling for years that hasn’t been fixed (the wife does).  I just don’t feel much like a human being sometimes.  More like a robot.  Do work, go home, chat with wife, entertain wife / myself, eat.  Repeat.  The monotony of the daily grind, although my life isn’t that hard so there’s not much actual grinding, doesn’t help matters. 

I was actually in a meeting recently and I found that I had woken up in the middle of it.  I had somehow tuned out for a minute or so.  Here’s the kicker, during that time I was actually answering questions.  It was like I had woken up from sleeping and there I was talking.  Apparently I did quite well as I was congratulated afterward.   I don’t entirely remember some parts of the meeting.  I think I’ve scripted a good 20% of my work conversations in my head and only need minimal cognitive capability to run those scripts.

When I was younger there was this local Christian retreat that kids could go to.  I didn’t feel particularly Christian but the retreats were still effective in providing some perspective on life.  Not in what they told you but in getting you out of your daily life and into situations where you were talking about your thoughts and listening to other people.   Just a few days without a watch on your arm and all kids of activities and I’d head back to the world and see everything as new.  It might have been a couple days but it felt like you had left the world for years. It was quite nice.

I went a bunch of times to the point where they put me in charge of some stuff.  I enjoyed it until frankly I felt I was too old to go.  Talking to the kids who were much younger than me was less a meaningful conversation, at least for me.  Serious questions of what to do in situation X when you’re younger isn’t quite the same when you’re older, even in the same situation.   Stuff changes.

I don’t know if it is relevant but during those retreats we used to stay up way late in the morning.  Teens have some sort of super human ability to stay up super late and sleep in and then reset their clock back to normal school with limited consequences.  I can still stay up late (just have to keep the brain going) and I can sleep late with no problem, but unlike when I was younger when my internal clock is off I can feel it, physically even.  This encourages me to avoid doing such things to an extreme.

Anyway when I would stay up late like when I’m writing now, 03:50 am, eventually things would seem, clearer.  I don’t know what that is.  Normally I feel perpetually distracted.  Concentration has never been a big skill for me.  I’m actually wearing my +5 concentration underwear and my concentration stats are still -3 (RPG joke).  Yet at some points when I stay up late I hit streaks where I feel quite focused.  I used to write at those hours when I was younger.  That’s not to say that was good writing, but I felt it was easier at that time.  Not staying up late as often now I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, although I’m not sure it did me much good then either.  I never felt I did much worthwhile if I read it the next morning.   Still for a bit I felt driven and purposeful?  Not sure purposeful is the word.

Now I’m older and far more in control of my daily life.  Something I would have much appreciated when I was younger.  Yet I never get away like I did at the retreats.  I don’t know where I would go today.  Still I find myself wishing for something, either to do, or see or I duno.  Just shake things up in a meaningful way.  Something about living deliberately rings thru my mind once in a while but for what or how I’m not sure.