Monday Morning Motivator! 26, Taking the Red Pill

Balancing with the Moon

As we begin the sixth month of the year, the initiation of the drive to halfway, the moon is a beautifully balanced 1st quarter, aka half moon, and the thing that keeps recurring for me in this weekly focus on self healing is the difficulty of achieving balance. There is always something pulling pulling pulling me into one sort of extremity or another. The recurring theme seems to be one of busy-ness, of spending time, and attention, in the direction of business.

Of course there are forces of economy that play on this, Boston is not cheap, and when you are self-employed this can happen rather easily. As your own schedule-maker it’s easy enough to just put in a little more time, just think about it some more, just look at calendar/email/twitter one more time before closing the lid on the whole thing. And of course I can sit back and see the need for balance, the need for focusing on all areas of my life in a way that brings everything to its natural state of full and happy expression, and for some reason it’s always back to getting busy about business.

Slacker-Hayseed-Nature-Boy

Which is funny because my true nature is as a slacker-hayseed-nature-boy, doing just enough to get by. Hanging out, going to the park, riding my bike, playing guitar, writing a song, going to the health food store, cooking a meal, hiking in the woods…any number of ways to just enjoy life, participate in the natural simple process of being alive and interacting with the world. And all of that seems to have changed since I joined, or rather re-joined, the digital world, back in the year of the triple oughts, 2000.

So way back in the way back, 1984 or something Orwellian like that, I had one of those ridiculous little computers that didn’t do much more than play Pong, or spell Happy Birthday on a blinking screen, which just happened to be my television, which I bought so that this little POS would have a monitor of some sort. 

What was that thing? A Vic 20. Yeah. And that was a bust of course, one more case of the marketers convincing my little monkey brain that it needed what would eventually kill it–and yet computers were the future, the shiny rosy future–and I wanted to live in the future.

My next foray into Digi-land was something that actually did something, an Apple IIe. This was the educators computer, and it did the trick as a word processor. It  got me through grad school, 2 years of creative writing courses, about 20 short stories and a 200 page thesis.I used it to put all of the songs I had written into digital form and to print them all out legibly, etc. 

Out of the Matrix

Then I got divorced, gave her the computer, dove deeper into slacker On The Road musician mode, and spent 12 blissful years out of the digital loop. I missed Al Gore’s invention of the internet, email, Napster, and all that stuff. Twelve years of bliss until suddenly in the year 2000 I bought a house and decided it was time to get hep to the times and rejoin the computer world.

That didn’t last long

Well well well–that was a deep dive and it was almost instantaneous. I feel like I only came up for air just this minute. Whew. Wow. Yikes. Is there any aspect of my life that has not been shaped and reshaped by this laptop revolution? And is there any addictive substance I have encountered in my life that has had the overwhelmingly powerful effect upon me that this iMac, iBook, MacBook triad has had for the past 9 years? Ack! Double ack!

Well, I’m smart enough to know when I’m acting more like the White Rabbit than Alice, more “I’m late I’m late” than “Curiouser and Curiouser”. And seriously, and in all Levity, this seems as good a week as any to put some strong energy into spending as much time as possible in the Real World, even though it seems that every strategy in business is directly linked through the matrix of Computer-Land, leaving me with a choice of Work/Computer or Play/Real World.

The Work vs. The Business

At any rate, this is definitely one of the things I will have to figure out, as the actual work, the service, the powerful effect I can have on people, doesn’t require any sort of connection to the internet, or to a keyboard and screen, etc. I work with my hands, I work with my voice, I work with my heart and my mind.

And then on the back end, on the business and communications front, the announcing what I’m doing and finding the people who need what I have to offer…Well in that area it seems that this laptop has its little fingers in everything. So that I can’t really separate the two. And in point of fact, I hardly open that machine up for any other reason.

Taking the Red Pill?

So this is the week to do more with less? To just walk away from the “one more email” mentality, to let everything take a little bit longer, to make hay while the sun shines (that’s a metaphor flipped completely onto its head, eh?), to find a happier balance. Wish me luck!

And how about you? What pulls you off balance? How crazy busy are you? How much time to you spend glued to that “hopeless little screen”?

photo by Maciej Chojnacki