Tuesday, October 1 2019

Dear Journal,

Good morning everyone! Hope you're doing well today. I'm having one of those mornings where I don't feel like I have a lot of energy. It's probably just because it's been so dark in the mornings. All this time I thought I had been really nailing my morning routine, but I'm starting to think that the bright summer sunlight was helping me all along. The winter mornings are the real stuff - the mornings where you don't even see any sun until you're already on your way to work. That's the real test of the human spirit.

You can't really control how much energy you have, can you? I feel like I have seasons of my life where everything gives me energy. I get it from my job, from talking to people, and from cleaning things around the house. During one of these seasons, momentum comes so easy.

Then I have seasons of my life where the energy doesn't come so easy. My side projects start to bore me, my chores start to ware me down, and my routines start to feel a little pointless.

It's OK. I think that's just how life works. If I can't control it, then there's no point thinking about it. I think the best way to deal with these seasons of life is to just really try to take advantage of the times you feel like accomplishing something with your free time. I try to create good habits and routines so that when I get to a season where waking up is hard and things feel a little tasteless, I can just hold onto the rails and wait for the season to pass.

One of the toughest lessons that's precipitated from my own journey into adulthood is that your time, attention, and energy are limited. And we know that you can't really control how much energy you have. I think the best way to do things is to worry about where you allocate your time and attention. When you have energy, be grateful for it and channel it into what you're doing, but I think it just runs out sometimes and you just need to wait it out.

I'm already starting to feel the engine warm up. Weirdly, I think complaining about a lack of energy gave me some of it back. This week should be pretty fun - I'm on day 2 out of 3 work days before leaving for Chicago for Sarah's wedding. I'm feeling pretty healthy today. Last night for dinner we ate some seared tilapia - just tilapia in olive oil - no breading or anything like that. Which wasn't so bad, especially because I had lots of good hot sauce to choose from.

Last night I also finished retooling the script that publishes my blog. After I hit the button, everything immediately gets sent to twitter and slack, and that makes me pretty happy. Marissa and I also crushed it with chores yesterday.

After dinner, we took Rod to Best Buy. Marissa wanted to window shop some chrome books, and we also wanted to kill time. We were gauging Rodney's interest in a gameboy. This time, Marissa actually got him interested in a game of Mario Kart. Rod cackled loudly in the middle of the quiet store every time she hit a banana peel. He also likes running around by the TVs. He likes to hit the demo buttons and run to the next one just as the obnoxious Bose audio demo starts to play.

When we got home, he went right to bed. We had to forfeit the bedtime story since we spent some extra time running around at best buy - but that's OK. After Rod went to bed, I caught up on chores, then Marissa and I watched the movie Sunshine. It feels good to have another solid movie pick under my belt. I'm still bothered that my first choice in our new movie routine was Hitch. I really bungled that one. In fact, Hitch was so bad, we find ourselves comparing every movie we watch to Hitch, as if every movie we watch is just another measure of how bad Hitch was.

I cannot stress this enough. Hitch is a bad movie.

That's my time. Kind of a lopsided journal entry today, isn't it? That's OK, it worked out. Hope you have a wonderful day today. Think about where your time and attention are going, but don't stress about your energy. You can't control that.