Hiking

Saturday Morning Musing

Chris Leave a comment

When this post goes us, I’ll be busy attending to my soul and mental well-being by going on a hike with a small selection of my favorite people. After several weeks of being too tired to do much and a constant lack of days we can all gather, those of us who are available tomorrow are just going to do something regardless of the fact that half our group is missing. It isn’t ideal, I’d rather spend the day with all of them, but I need to get active and to spend time with people who help me forget myself for a while. With all the stress and anxiety that have been building the past three months, I need to ignore my desire to stay home alone to work on processing review suggestions and actually go do something I know I’ll love.

I’ve always enjoyed walking. I like losing myself in my gait as I wander from place to place, maybe listening to music or just taking in the sounds of wherever I’m at. Hiking is a sort of extension of that, because it takes me out of areas that always grate on me, cities with the constant hum of cars and neighborhoods with the quiet noises of people going about their daily lives. If you pick the right hiking location, you can go the entire hike without encountering anyone. You can embrace the quiet of nature and the irritating hum of modern life that most people only notice when it’s gone disappears completely. You can lose yourself in trees and the quiet emerald peace of a nature at its strongest. If you’ve picked a place with some nice elevation changes, there are a ton of great places to stop and admire the world around you. I’ve always enjoyed looking at the horizon and having an unobstructed view of the sky and there’s just something wonderful about getting both of those things as a result of being on top of something that rises above the area around me. Only in hiking trips can I get all of that at once.

Even though I’m going with my friends, I’ll be able to enjoy that. These are all people who know me well enough that there are no awkward silences to fill. I don’t need to worry about how to maintain a conversation or how to segue from one thought to another because they all just get how my mind works enough to not always need an explanation. I can just be myself around them and their presence doesn’t intrude on my sense of peace and quiet. For the past several years, we’ve always done at least a couple of hiking trips every month, though we’ve been doing fewer of those lately because of how busy everyone has been. They’ve been some of my fondest memories and include some of my favorite pictures. All of the background pictures you’ll ever see on my blog are pictures I’ve taken while hiking. If I could, I’d do all my thinking and writing in a spot that overlooks the surrounding area and has an unobstructed view of the entire sky. My dream house idea focuses mostly around a taller tower with what is essentially a glass dome on the top so I can sit up there and read or write as close to the sky as I can get. Heck, the whole thing might just be a tower of some kind. But it would have to be on the side of a mountain or on the top of a tall hill somewhere. That would be amazing.

After hiking, I’m planning to do the Pokemon Go Community day since I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about the game now that I don’t have my ex to give me a reason to keep playing it. I don’t really feel like it “our thing” anymore, thankfully, but I still wonder if I’m just wasting my time on something that isn’t really adding anything to my life since I have a tendency to play the game alone and let it distract me from the main purpose of my frequent walks. It’s so easy to bring alone and leave running in my pocket, but I’m not good at ignoring it when it’s in there and will start to feel anxious if I don’t check it for a while. It works the same way as notifications on my phone do. If I know they’re there, it will always cause me more stress to just ignore them than to skim through them and either open them or dismiss them. In order to save myself from needless stress, I’ve started disabling certain notifications on my phone and setting up hour-long notification silences so I won’t notice when they show up until the hour is over. I’ve also removed most time-waster games from my phone for the same reason. I also repeatedly install and uninstall Imgur as I cycle between just needing something to kill some time and realizing that I’ll just sit on the couch and browse through Imgur for an hour instead of going to bed or starting my writing. Which is why I’m still on the fence about Pokemon Go. I definitely benefit from still having Sudoku on my phone because it often works as a way of doing some mental stretching when I’ll feeling particularly tired or fogged up from how focused I’ve been on my work.

It’s a really nebulous balance and I’m probably going to be working on it my whole life. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to just figure out how much work to do and how much relaxation to put in and when it’s already to simply escape instead of doing something genuinely relaxing. Even though I love writing and reading, they’re still work. Even though I’m super excited to start reading all of the amazing books people have written and mentioned to me on Twitter, there’s still a lot of work to do just to find all the links, titles, and authors. I want to just wake up in the morning and dig right in to my to-do list, but I need to take time to relax and hike and let my to-do list remain undone. I’m still doing at least four hours of writing or book recommendation collation a day, so it’s not like I’m slacking off, I just always feel like it’s hard to justify taking the time to wander through the woods or spend a few hours walking around the city with some friends while we catch Pokemon. I’ve only got so much time, after all. I want to get the most I can out of it and it’s, no matter how long I live, I don’t think it’ll ever be clear how to do that.

 

Hike Up Your Pants and Climb

Chris Leave a comment

Every time I sit down to write, I’m reminded of the mountain I’ve got to climb to reach any of my goals. Publish a book. Make enough money to live off my writing. Update my blog 3 or more times a week for a year (haha, right??? I can’t even do this for a week). All of these things require a huge commitment from me in not only time, but in energy and self.

Every time I want to write I have to marshal my thoughts and set aside whatever else has occupied my day. I have to stop thinking about bills, student loans, doing laundry, trying to find a date, and whatever pointless bit of minutiae my anxiety has fixed on. Then, as soon as that’s done, I need to collect my thoughts about whatever project I want to work on. After that, there’s the constant need to spend a decent amount of energy keeping those thoughts collected and the incessant report of my anxieties knocking against my defenses, trying to worm their way back in. The act of writing itself takes a part of me that I keep from the world the rest of the time and puts it somewhere I INTEND people to see, so it can be difficult to do with the kind of confidence needed to actually do more than make a half-assed attempt.

Even when it was easier, when I was writing every day, there was never what you could call an “easy” day. I may have had an easier time getting myself to sit down and do it, but it was never easy to actually do. I’ve spent a huge amount of time thinking and writing about the difficulties associated with writing. I’m always interested in reading what other writers have written about the act of writing. I’ve got a whole sub-classification of my poetry that is specifically about my difficulties in writing or how often I feel like none of the words I produce are the right ones. I’ve got a whole blog that is currently themed after the concept of struggling to find and use my words with undertones of how much I struggle to actually do it.

I’m pretty well versed in this kind of adversity, clearly. I could probably write a doctoral thesis on it (and might someday, depending on whether or not I actually go for an advanced degree in the future).

It does get easier to do, the more often you do it. I know that. You probably know that. Its true of pretty much everything one can do. It’s also true that there’s a point of diminishing return where it stops being noticeably easier. I would like to get back to that point, sure, but that just means I’m better at getting on the mountain to work on climbing it. It doesn’t actually make the mountain smaller.

Even in an ideal situation, with time to write every day and a minimum of other worries to keep away, I’ve still got a daunting task to accomplish. Not only that, I’ve got two I need to complete in a row to really count them as the success I want to see. I can’t just write a book, I’ve got to get myself to the point where I can write full-time.

Sitting here, at the base of all three of my mountains, I can tell you it’s really hard to make myself start walking up any one of them, much less split my time between all three. It seems far more tempting to find a path with some nice hills and valleys, some easier treks to try before I really make an attempt at any of my mountains.

I’ve never been very good at letting myself off easy, though. As much as I really want to consider something easier, as much as I’d like to take the easy route, I know the only reason I’d ever wind up in those hills and valleys is if I fell off one of my mountains. I may doubt myself constantly and wonder if I’m as good as other people have said (one teacher had to pretty much beat it into me and I’ll be forever grateful), but I know I’m good at trying again.

As today literally showed me, doing something again is always easier than doing it the first time and, somethings, you’ve just got to hike up your pants and climb that stupid rock. I did. There was a great view at the top. Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to say the same thing from the top of one of my metaphorical mountains.

 

In more business-y terms, I’m in the process of setting up some streaming and video-recording capabilities on my computer, solely so I can make and upload a “1000 Ways to Die: LoZ Edition” video along with the review I eventually post of Breath of the Wild. I might link a YouTube account to this thing or just post all my videos here if people are interested. Other potential videos include a “Naked and Afraid” run-through of Breath of the Wild” which will likely be the source of many of the 1000 deaths and something to do with the Dragon Age franchise. I dunno. Maybe some kind of heavy RP and story-telling element video. We’ll see. I’ve got a history of planning bigger projects than I can accomplish, so take that all with a grain of salt.