The Unbearable Lightness of Escaping Your Calendar
Friday, November 15, 2024
It’s been a while since posting on here. I completed my previous goal: post a newsletter every Friday for a year. Once the goal was completed, I went on a trip and lost all momentum. Looking back, I didn’t stop because I traveled. I stopped because it was the wrong goal. The goal was and is still to express yourself and share what is interesting to you. But perhaps there are seasons that go with doing so. Seasons to be “organized” with your head down, and others where you drift with your head in the clouds. Both seem necessary.
Regardless, in that time, I reread the newsletter from beginning to end which was good, took a break from writing which was good too, and so today I’d like to share some recent thoughts I’ve had in the essay below.
For the last three years, I wrote a daily log of what I did every single day.
Now, over a thousand-plus days later, I can tell you, brimming with confidence mixed with bitters of shame, doing that was not the best use of time.
It started in September 2021; I was going back to school.
Before then, I didn’t really use a calendar because I didn’t want to use a calendar. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do well with structure. I know structure is good for you and at times I know there’s value in keeping your head down rather than in the clouds, but, for better or worse, I keep drifting back to them.
That said, knowing that I would have to stay on top of things with class and homework and assignments and all that good stuff, I knew I had to stay organized. So I downloaded an app called Notion and subsequently read Austin Klein’s book Steal Like an Artist where he recommends people to log their days so I began logging mine and later losing my mind.
On the one hand, it was good. I attended every single class. I did all of my assignments on time. I did all of the readings and all of the homework. Blah blah blah. I even went to office hours. Office hours! Can you believe it? I ended up with a solid GPA and a degree from a great school.
My younger self in undergrad at Boulder, Colorado would be aghast considering I skipped hundreds of classes, maybe a thousand, barely did my homework nor the readings and forget about office hours, but I figured out how to cram for exams and even back then I loved to write. My A and B essays and test scores tipped the scales just far enough to outweigh my D and F attendance and homework scores where I finished Boulder with a not-so-solid GPA. But hey, I finished on time, and I got to wear my black cap and gown on the same day and on the same Folsom Field as my peers just like I got to wear my purple cap and gown on the same day and in the same New York Yankees stadium with my peers. Made it on time either way.
On the other hand, it was bad. I was overly and unnecessarily stressed every single hour of every single day of grad school. My hands were idle but my vices still found me day and night. I learned a lot in journalism school and I met some really smart, driven, and funny people, too. But man the whole experience was a lot to bear. I remember about halfway through hitting the wall so bad that I had to meet with a program’s guidance counselor because the students I work with at the English center where I teach kept coming up to saying, “Hey Teacher, you don’t look so good.” I wasn’t good, inside and out.
Then one day, school ended and I was thrown into existence within the post-grad void. Those first few months and really the whole year and some change after school ended were rough. The accompanying blues were real and weighty. But I kept logging my days, trying to figure out the perfect schedule to get things done.
After school ended I told myself I would take the summer off and do nothing. After so much doing, my new assignment was to not do. The problem is that I was still high as a kite off the adrenaline of hitting deadlines week in and week out for school. The comedown of grad school was too steep. Vertigo began to set in.
So I gave myself a different assignment: a newsletter. There are a few newsletters that I’ve enjoyed reading such as Austin Kleon’s or Maria Popova where they would share 5-10 things every week of things they found interesting or insightful. I liked that concept and merely a week later after graduation, I published my first newsletter. My goal was simple: publish every single Friday for a year. I accomplished my goal this past May right before I went on a trip back to the US for my brother’s wedding in Oregon. 52 up, 52 down. And then I stopped. But I didn’t stop logging my days in my Notion calendar. I was still writing down what I was doing every single day. I realized that I had become obsessed to the point of it being unhealthy. I couldn’t stop. Stopping meant those days would then cease to exist. I was living in my calendar, but I wasn’t living outside of it. I was trapped in my own trap. It wasn’t until I went on another trip back to the States for another wedding, this time my friend’s in California, that I had a realization that hit me on my flight from Haneda to Los Angeles.
The alluring trap of planning and living in your calendar is you never have to live in reality. You get to live in fantasy. If you’re always preparing, you never have to do the work. If you’re always assessing, you never have to take a risk. If you’re always trying to keep track, you lose track completely.
I heard Yuval Harri, author of Sapiens say a funny quote, “If humans are so smart, then why are we so stupid?” The funny part is when I think back to all of that time logging days in my calendar, writing down what you’re doing, planning days, weeks, and months in advance, constantly checking and revising, down to 30-minute increments sometimes, even with all of that effort to stay organized, I was very disorganized. I was still all over the place. I was still missing things, key things left and right. I wasn’t taking care of myself at all.
If I was so organized, then why was I so disorganized?
Sure, it’s good to keep track of things. Day by day, week by week, whatever. From leaving the house so you get work on time, to paying taxes, to calling a family member on their birthday, there are things you need to stay on top of. Nobody has it all together. I mean, I’ve never met someone that has it all together. Looks can be very deceiving, but underneath the surface of everything that makes you and me unique, people are largely similar. Every single snowflake, unique from the rest, melts into the same ol’ water. That’s us, baby, we’re all in the flow of life together. Thrown in the deep end and drifting downstream towards the same cliff.
It’s now November 2024. My days of logging are done. I’ve escaped the trap of the daily log / calendar. Was it because I turned over the leaf of a new decade? Nah. Was it the realization I had one cross pacific flight? Maybe. 12-hour flights are a great time to ponder life. Thoughts can get quite strange at 30,000 feet up when you're inside a metal tube for that long. How did I break this habit of three years? A book. One I started reading in San Diego, where I’m from, and have continued reading in Ho Chi Minh City, where I’m living. One that came out four decades ago this year. One written about two men, two women, and a dog. It’s a novel by Czech-Franco, author, Milan Kundera. It’s titled The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And holy smokes did it rock my shit.
In the beginning of the novel, boy meets girl. They like each other. They both have an existential breakdown because of it. But, yeah, nonetheless, like they each other. What’s interesting is how they met. They met because of six perfectly timed coincidences. I’ll spare the details of such but this that and the other thing – Kundera calls these the “birds of fortuity.”
It’s all of these little coincidences that are stringed together over time. Upon reflection, it’s these beautiful little chance moments that have led you to where you are and why you are who you are. Such moments cannot be planned for and that’s what makes them beautiful.
I think about all of the coincidences that led me to Kundera’s book. My friend was getting married that weekend. I flew to San Francisco airport. There’s more than one place to buy books there but I chose that one. I had heard of that book but had never seen it in a bookstore until that day. And there it was on the top bookshelf, a single copy, for me to take home with me. And for me to take home with me to read on that particular trip after having that realization on that particular flight. In the same month, three years later, I had been keeping up with this highly productive, highly soul-crushing habit. Note: You cannot plan that. That is the birds of fortuity perching themselves on your shoulder and singing a new tune for you to listen to and understand because the timing was right and you were receptive to hear the message that potentially in any other moment would have gone in one ear and out the other. You might have been listening to the song this whole time, but you weren’t hearing the music being played.
Not until you finally hear the music do you hear the message. And like when Apollo played his harp, the rest of the Muses heard the music and began to dance. The music took over and you begin to let go, and actually enjoy the day ahead instead of trying to control it.
It made me think perhaps I needed to do all of that nonsense, I needed to waste all of that time to learn the lesson so it would actually cut deep enough so the lesson would scar you and you wouldn’t forget. Or put another way, as Melody Godfred alludes to, you find your rhythm in life when you realize that even the steps backward are part of the dance.
It wasn’t too long after reading Kundera, I read an article by Ryan Holiday outlining why he doesn’t have any goals. It’s in line with one of my favorite quotes by Hunter S Thompson where he reminds us to forget about goals in a letter to his friend. It reminds me of Fight Club where your subconscious is trying to run you off the road because you won’t let go of the wheel — you won’t let go of trying to control everything. Perhaps you need to try to control everything and still end up crashing on the side of the metaphorical road so you learn precisely that you can’t control everything. No one can.
For me, it was a real breakthrough moment. Let go of trying to schedule everything into neat boxes. It’s a waste of time. It’s like what Alan Watt refers to when you’re trying to package water into an envelope. Let go so your life doesn’t become some big to-do list that watches over you. Let go of your need for achievement and goals, so you can actually enjoy things rather than just strive for stuff. It made me think about why I really got into writing in the first place. No, not writing essays in my apartment back in Boulder. No I mean when I first started writing in cafes in Saigon, because I had so much time to myself after moving that I would go to cafes and sit there for hours, drinking way too much coffee and smoking way too many cigarettes, and reading some book that blew my mind while I watched thousands of motorcycles drive by long enough before I felt something, something so strongly that it wasn’t something for me to write in my journal or just keep to myself. I felt something strong enough that I felt the need to share with it other people. Yes, that is why I got into writing. Like David Bowie says, "Never play to the gallery. Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that, if you could manifest it in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexisted with the rest of society."
For me that manifested into words on a screen, for others they paint flowers or mix records, whatever it is, whether you like it or not, you do feel things that you need to express and you do need to express them. You can’t plan for those feelings. That’s what makes them so real. That feeling of the muse pulling your arm so you get your back up off the wall and dance. This is around the time that I could share another quote about the concept of life and planning and living the moment and there are so many to choose from. And they’re all probably true in some form. And the reason is that tirelessly planning your life is an escape from living it. It is escapism through and through. Yes, calendars are good, but like anything, many things that are good can turn bad to the nth degree. Or as Carl Jung said, "Every good quality has its bad side, and nothing that is good can come into the world without directly producing a corresponding evil.”
The same thing goes for writing something more long-form — like a book. Along with my days of obsessive calendaring, I’ve thought about a concept for a long-form project on escapism. It is a topic that I can’t get out of my head. I’ve tried. It won’t go away. I think about escapism a lot. The reason is because it’s everywhere and happening all of the time. I see it in books, in movies, in songs, in my life, in other people’s lives, and for years, I would try to gather notes about it, I would try to write small things here and there about it (most of it garbage), and most of all I would try to create the perfect outline for a book, in the same manner, I would try to create a perfect calendar for my life. It’s all an escape masquerading as a new character.
And the same principle applies: in trying to create the perfect outline for a book, you never have to actually write it. You allow yourself the privilege to dance around the edges of actually doing the thing while never having to take the plunge. And that’s why it’s time to dive in, see what we can find, and redirect the focus of this newsletter.
There’s no perfect calendar. There’s no perfect essay to relaunch a newsletter. There’s no perfect outline. There’s no perfect life. There are just choices. And there are consequences. And there are coincidences. A lot of which cannot be planned for or determined as right or wrong. The river of life doesn’t stop for anyone and flows in only one direction. As Kundera writes, “Human life only occurs once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which are bad is that in a given situation we can only make one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”
Living in your calendar is an escape from living your life. It is one that I fell victim to. It is one that many fall victim to. I hope if that’s you right now, there is light at the end of the tunnel. A seemingly unbearable light, one weighty with responsibility and risk but most importantly meaning. You don’t want a weightless life. You want something heavy to contend with. Like in the Old Man and the Sea, he throws his line out at the end of Act 1 and begins to snooze and drift. And that could be the whole story. And Day 84 becomes Day 85 and Day 85 becomes Day 86 and so on so forth. But it’s no mistake the marlin takes the bate on the very next page. Hemingway knew, like Kundera knew, like so many learn from drifting at sea and otherwise deep down you don’t want to. You want something to contend with like trying to reel in the great marlin at sea rather than simply throwing a line out and hitting snooze for the day. Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s imperfect. It’s scary. Neither trials nor triumphs make a whole lot of sense most of the time. It’s all of that and a bag of chips. But it’s yours for the taking. There will never be another like it.
Quit trying to control everything or worse document it all out of fear none of it will exist. Let go. Bear the weight of a meaningful existence. There is no escaping it, only embracing it. Don’t try to escape from life, escape to life.
Excellent!