40.

It's such a shame that my best thoughts come to me when I'm meditating. You know, the one moment when you're supposed to be free from your thoughts. I was thinking about the subject for my research paper, having all kinds of good ideas for it and imagining writing them down and constructing a first paragraph for them. Then I was thinking about how it's such a shame that all my best thoughts come to me when I'm meditating. I thought that this would be a good thing to write in my daily writing. I missed the two previous days, after all. And I could write about the ideas that I had while meditating. And make it kind of an ironic thing, by also referring to the fact that I thought about it being a shame that all my best thoughts come to me when I'm meditating. My one moment of quiet of the day looks like this. That's me, I guess.

So about these writings, I seem to be missing more days than not. So maybe this whole daily writing thing is just not for me. Not that I want to stop doing it, I really like these writings. But having the obligation to do them every day is a bit... straining I guess. I've already subconsciously accepted that I'm not going to do it every day, so who would I be fooling if I'd keep on thinking that I will? Anyways, maybe I'll just keep going like this until I hit 100 days, and then start filling up the gaps. That way I can get to a proper 100 writings without forcing myself to write every day. I do love the idea of writing every single day, and I think for a lot of people (writers, for instance) it can be a real help. But I'm not really a writer. If anything, I want to write about philosophy. And that hasn't really been a problem for me. I just start writing and nothing can stop me. Now if I'd ever want to pick up fiction writing, that would be a different story. I'd need all the motivation and encouragement and gimmicky self-help stuff I could get my hands on. But philosophy flows from me like a river. (See, I use hideous metaphors like that! Me writing fiction would be a disaster.)

Also, it's a miracle, but I think I finally discovered the joy of cleaning up! Now I don't mean that I enjoy the cleaning up process so terribly much, but I do see now that living in a clean place is a joy, and that motivates me to clean up. I have a terrible habit of getting grumpy whenever anything cleaning-related needs to happen, and I think I'm now finally breaking through that habit. Cleaning is not useless!

Oh yeah, and my girlfriend gave me a very good tip recently. (This writing is, as you can probably tell, just a ramble.) You see, I'm not a very focused worker. I look with great admiration at the people who can work in a structured manner, with blocks of working and blocks of break. That's not me. I get to work and always spend the first ten minutes doing something else. My brain is soft and weak; I can't get it to work like a machine. It's distracted all the time and it wants things all the time. But anyways, the tip that she gave me is: every time you get distracted by something, do nothing instead. So every time I want to open Reddit or Facebook, I have to resist and do nothing instead. Just take in the moment and go back to work when I feel like it. I think this is smart, because giving in to distractions means losing the momentum and the moment of what you're working on. Every transition from distraction back to work takes time and energy, and it's incredibly wasteful. When you do nothing instead, you keep the thoughts within reach, instead of purging them in favor of cat videos and stupid memes about obscure subjects. So that's what I'm going to try doing from now on. Not resisting the getting distracted, but resisting the distraction. I can stop working all I want, but I can't allow myself to do other stuff instead.