Paddling through ennui to openness
H and I are planning a paddling trip to Barkley Sound for late September. I look forward to unplugging for a couple weeks. I have a media consumption problem. I used to procrastinate by cleaning the house, baking, etc. Something of value, if not the thing of highest priority. Now I procrastinate by reading the news, reading analysis of the news, reading metaanalysis of the analysis. But, really, it’s avoidance. Usually, it is avoidance of work that needs to be done but makes me feel bad for some reason. Absurdly, sometimes the reason I feel bad is for having avoided it already.
I don’t have a television. This used to save me from myself (the only way I can avoid an all-night binge when in a hotel room is to never turn it on – otherwise it’s rerun after rerun of Law and Order), along with the 28.8k modem that prevented any web-surfing when I was writing my thesis. But the interwebs have advanced, and I seem to be helpless in the face of the onslaught. I put LeechBlock on my work computer. It helps a little. I brought in a timer to the office last week — an attempt at a college studying trick to keep me on task. I could disconnect the internet at home, but that seems extraordinarily draconian. Instead, I have been trying slowly to address the problem of avoidance.  I started on a goal/task making program at the suggestion of a therapist I saw last year. This is fine, as long as I do it. But there’s the rub — in years past I made lists of goals/tasks automatically, but the reservoir of desire seems to be low.  And my successful-daughter-of-the-second-wave, mid-life angst is just as annoying as it is stereotypical.  Ah, yes, feel that surge of annoyance. Annoyance isn’t apathy! I will stay with the annoyance energy and end this paragraph.
The solution is to identify the things I want to do. This is a solution of privilege, but ennui is a problem of privilege. Which is why I romanticize subsistence agriculture – thinking that the problem is privilege itself.
But then, there is no problem. There just is.
ADDED: A certain wallowing wombat may need to get her wombat head out of her wombat a** and get on with her wombat activities. Like digging for roots and crushing predators against the roof of her burrow with her strong hind legs.