The Body Is A Hard Drive
Reformatting by slowing down and reflecting on the purpose of my work
Yes, we are currently in World War III and it didn’t start over a month ago. There is a spiritual war — a battle for our souls — that is being fought across all of humanity, and you either know what I’m talking about or you don’t.
This next bit of writing is tough for me. I’m not inclined to talk about deeply personal stuff on this or any online platform. If I ever do, it’s more likely to be related to a difficult event from the past, something I chose to see as ultimately positive; a revelation I’ve had, or a lesson I’ve learned. (And if I am able to weave in some humour whilst recounting the sitch, I hope it also makes some of you giggle a little. Seriously, we all need to laugh more.)
However, in this time of planetary turmoil, I’ve been dealing with my own personal ball of confusion and pain. A few of my close friends know of what I’m going through and I’m very grateful for the empathy and support they’ve offered, but mostly it feels like there is never enough time to properly deal with (heal from) a situation I unexpectedly found myself in. As has been the case for quite a while, I have a plethora of work commitments as well as many personal or collaborative projects that press on me. In theory, they are all great and some of them could even earn me income potentially, but as of right now, whilst I invest my time in learning new skills and aim to finish long-standing creative projects, that ain’t the case. This comes with the territory of being an artist and creative entrepreneur. I completely accept that as my (garden?) path, after all I went out of my way to walk it and no matter the difficulties of trying to balance the paid/unpaid work I do, I don’t ever regret choosing it.
And since I am not indifferent, because I am committed to all the projects on my to-do list (as in, I started them because they all make sense to me, my soul is excited by them), these tasks will get done, of that I am sure.
But something in all of this — or rather, in all of me — needs to give.
At the start of every week, I always put together my list of “things to do.” Most people would not believe the extent and scope of these lists if they saw them!
Every week I aim to move gracefully from one task to the next, switching mental gears as I do, since each project requires different sections of my brain to function. If we were going by number of tasks, I do generally tend to get a lot crossed off each week, so that should make me happy, right? Recently however, I have been feeling increasingly frustrated by how much didn’t get achieved, not to mention how stressed I felt in trying to achieve it all. And there’s a certain pattern as to which tasks get done: week in and week out, a few tasks never even get close to being crossed out, they keep on getting deferred to the following week’s list. In the case of a few important ones to do with my music which are pretty huge (as in I need a day to think about how to approach working on them), this has been going on for a few months now.
It doesn’t help that in periods of overwhelm, my mind defaults to churning over recent inexplicable personal events (and that’s on top of trying to make sense, for almost 4 years now, of crazy-mad events on a local, national and international scale). In theory, I know the trick to solve perpetual cogitation, and I’ve used it many a time: work on something you can do right now and that will banish the bewilderment. Let yourself focus on a task that will take your monkey mind away from perplexing situations you have no control over.
But of course this is just a delay tactic. All feelings need to be felt, and whether they are positive or negative, all emotions will insist on being processed. Ultimately you cannot trick yourself and you cannot solve problems of this sort with your mind.
Plus my mind is telling me all those tasks are urgent and should have been done five weeks ago! So I have no time right now to sit with feelings of sadness and confusion…
Which is why I really appreciated this post by Tereza Coraggio which landed in my inbox a couple of days ago.
Imagine time as a pocket that keeps expanding the more you put into it, so it takes more to fill it up. But if you take things out of that pocket, what I find is that it still accommodates whatever it is I need to do. Time is a hamster wheel where we create as much time as we need. The faster we run the faster that Wheel of Time goes and the faster we have to go to keep up with it. But if we slow down we can even step off the hamster wheel and take a breath and let things play out.
There are things at work in the world we can’t control, can't make better and can't make happen faster. They're something that needs to play out. In the meantime we can savor own lives and look at what we want to get out of our day, and not set ourselves deadlines as much as possible.
After reading that sensible reminder the other day, I’ve been saying to my over-occupied, multi-tasking, self:
Try to do a lot less and you’ll (likely) get more done.
And the most important reminder from the heart connected to my brain:
One thing at a time, love!
I dropped my tasks — literally dropped more than half a year’s worth to-do lists on the floor (see above) — and went for a long walk.
And that was when I was reminded of this phrase I read in a novel years ago.
The body is a hard drive.
And the hard drive has its own finite storage capacity. I know that if I don’t address the negative emotions, they will remain somewhere inside me. Which means they will eventually manifest somatically in some unhealthy way. I have to allow myself to feel pain in order to heal from it.
The body is a hard drive and I need a soft reboot.
Bonus Squirt
Also on that mind-clearing walk, I examined the significance of my work right here.
Since one of the tasks on my to-do list every week is Sane Francisco, I have been asking myself recently:
What does this work and effort mean to me?
Does my output have any value?
Given how many amazing writers and thinkers there are out there, am I adding to the conversation?
Am I creating more distractions for myself and others, and if so, is that creating more “work” for me?
And most importantly, given the title of this Substack:
Am I increasing sanity?
I’m reflecting on the answers that are coming and they will guide me.
Related to which, one answer did come last night. I had a very clear vision of something I want to create, but it is something I know will take a while to execute well (not to mention, entire existing projects first need to be crossed off from my now infamous to-do lists).
I came to the simple realization that as an artist, I was never here to churn out “content.” I really only want to create work that aligns with my personal mission (for example, work like this, this and this) of creating a saner world (or laughing at the insane parts).
So please bear with me whilst I slowly heal myself and in so doing reconfigure my approach to how I show up on here. This means you may see me putting out fewer posts in the interim (aka “quality not quantity”).
Oh, and one last essential reminder for me/you/them/us:
Fantsstic yeh the mind reformatted. Wow such lists. Are you born in January hahah.. just joking.
Yeh there is a lot of robotic A.o vibes going on at th emoment and its the letting go that seems t have the hardest time in a world of constant change
I did a piece spoken word on the Violent circuit how all energy condenses when a thought or action is amde and it always closes with a spark
https://youtu.be/aGXxr8U8RAQ
Hello San Franciscan, your Substack, and your speaking out for freedom, have meant a lot to me-- and I have no doubt that many others would say the same thing. I understand about "to do" overwhelm, and in the midst of this, letting one's own projects wait (... and wait.... and wait....) For me, certainly, beginning in the winter of 2020, the whole ever-morphing covid show has been mind-blowingly weird, the mega-distraction of mega distractions. Thanks for the links and reminders. May your decisions about what to do and what not to do, and when, be just right for you.