Habits and Hobbies and Who I’m Becoming and “Free Time”
Unfinished and unstarted projects; one of many such shelves I live with
In the early days of lockdown I came to the realization (after a huge amount of thinking/reading/living) that I could become who I wanted to be. I could be a photographer and a musician and build my life around that. But to do that I needed to be a photographer and a musician. There’s a great book called It’s Not How Good You Are, it’s How Good You Want to Be* by Paul Arden. In it he talks about a young man who wants to be an architect, so he gets a business card that simply has his name and the title “Architect.” (RIP business cards. Remember those?)
Fake it ‘til you make it? Not really. I am what I do.
So how do I become a photographer and musician? I take photographs and I make music. How do I do that? I take time to do those things. I arranged my calendar so that certain days of the week were devoted to specific activities. One day was designated for taking photos. Another day was for developing film. Another day was for writing music. Another was for the technical side of making music (cleaning the studio, etc.). And it worked to an extent. I devoted time to doing the things I wanted to be doing.
When I specify time to do things regularly, they become habits. It’s so essential to actually take that time though. I effortlessly lose time to things that aren’t important to me, to my addictions to the phone or reading news online. Neither of those things enrich me or fulfill me or make me happy in any way, really. They are functionally identical to my drinking. I would drink to fill time, and then that time was gone. And the way I drank, that time was truly gone. I was alone, not social. I was reading news or watching videos online and not retaining any of it. Or worse, I was fucking around with my music and not getting anywhere or getting frustrated because I couldn’t remember to do basic things with my music gear and I would have to re-learn basic things that I wouldn’t remember the next day. Sober, I remember how to use my music gear. I am more mindful of what makes a photograph that I like. I can string together a week’s worth of half-hour sessions into a completed project.
One habit that was my lifeline when I got sober was practicing piano. I had started with a terrific teacher and committed to weekly lessons, which meant that I had committed to daily practice. The tumult of late 2021 interrupted that habit and I haven’t started it up again. Now that I’m writing this, I will. It brought me joy, and I saw improvement in myself with every practice session and every lesson. It filled my cup unlike scrolling Instagram or reading the news.
Even as I write this I’m drawn to opening a new tab on this browser for the news. I seek that hit in the ways that my brain knows are satisfying. But I’m also sitting here writing for a half-hour, and that slakes my thirst, too. One of the ways that I sabotage myself is by dropping back into the hope/fear paradigm. I hope that I will build a project (a DIY synthesizer for example), so I purchase the components, which is a project in itself. It takes hours of scouring the internet for parts, making orders, tracking them in a spreadsheet so I don’t lose track of them, finding space for the boxes as they arrive, and ultimately making space and time to assemble the thing. The assembly is a lot of work, and then there’s the troubleshooting and calibration when, and this is a certainty, it doesn’t quite work the way it’s supposed to. As you might guess, I have a fuckton of projects that are incomplete and at least as many that I haven’t started. So the boxes pile up and the spreadsheets go unopened and in the meantime I’ve gone through my head a hundred times that it might be more satisfying (and cost-effective) to buy a similar piece of gear, complete, and actually use it.
Another hope would be that I think it would be cool to write music using a certain piece of gear. I buy it hoping that I will use it in the future. I don’t use it. The studio closes in on me, full of gear I’m not using. The fear is that I will never use the gear. I will die unfulfilled by the satisfaction of using that musical instrument. But that satisfaction could be fulfilled by myriad other instruments that are literally collecting dust around me.
I see a book that looks interesting. I buy it with hope. It sits on the shelf (more accurately in a teetering pile next to my bed) and I fear that I will never read it.
Hope and fear are assholes.
When I say this out loud, I spend less. I’m able to use the things I already have, to play the instruments that are already here, to choose from the library haphazardly accumulated. I have enough things to last my entire life, regardless of how long I live. And then some.
I have to write and talk my way through hope and fear. It works, and it’s steady work.
I love you,
David
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