Hello, beloved!
I hope that you have been feeling the love and being filled with love.
I’m sending you this love letter to tell you about just a few of the things that I have recently loved with the hope that maybe you will love them too and if not, that at least you will love how I loved them…
So…
WHAT HAVE I LOVED THINKING ABOUT?
Time.
In Busy Love Letter #003 I wrote about this gamification app called Habitica that I started using a few weeks ago and how it was finally helping me win the war against my long-time nemeses: procrastination and the anxiety that comes with it.
Well… everything was going great until Habitica started turning me into… Robotica.
What I mean by this is that I had started getting obsessed with planning my day down to the dot and doing a specific set of activities in a specific order, day in day out, without fail.
I was slowly exchanging the anxiety of procrastination for that of seeking “perfection”.
The problem was that I was planning for too much of my day and barely leaving any room for entropy… chaos, randomness – whatever you call it. I wasn’t planning for the unplannable.
And that quickly came back to bite me. I found myself cutting short moments of spontaneous joy just so I could move on to the next item in my day. I started forcing myself to do tasks that I was simply not in the mood for just because I had scheduled them and didn’t want to lose points. Or even worse, cheat myself by ticking them off for the points without doing them. I was basically becoming a slave to my own schedule.
Fortunately, I quickly zeroed in on the problem. I realized that planning for all 24 hours of my day is not only delusional but also arrogant. It’s basically a way of saying I know exactly what the future holds in terms of both what the world will bring me and how I will react to it.
I’ve found that a more modest and realistic approach is to plan for roughly two thirds and leave the rest to whatever the gods of chaos throw at me. If something pops up, I can face it immediately without having to worry about my schedule and still manage to catch up later, on whatever I got thrown off of. If nothing pops up, that’s just more time for me to do more of what I enjoy or get a head start on the next day.
Another hack I have found for Habitica is not being too specific for example, instead of scheduling time to work on a particular project, I just schedule time to sit in front of my laptop. When I get there, I let myself figure out which project strikes the best balance between being urgent in terms of its approaching deadline and being perfect for my current mood.
This has allowed me to go from seeing my timetable as a burden and responsibility that I have to bear and more as a joy and privilege that I get to experience. From thinking along the lines of, “ugh, I’m doing this because I made a plan to do it and the time for it has come so now I have to do it so that my Habitica score doesn’t drop” to thinking more like, “Oh look, billions of conditions on this ball of dust hurling through space have aligned for me to get the opportunity to do this and as a bonus, I’ll get extra points on this cool app I recently found”
I’m always seeking ways to figure out how to do what I need to do with less effort and I’m so glad I’m in this space of mind where I’m able to enjoy having both solid structure and fluid flexibility to my day – my schedule is really starting to feel like a living, breathing body.
WHAT HAVE I LOVED (TO HATE) READING?
Okay, first of all I must say writing this content series has really shown me how often I love to hate things. Trust me, the irony is not lost on me… I don’t know what that’s about and I’m not yet ready to unpack it so I’m just going to keep going with the flow until further notice, okay? Perhaps I’ll explore it in a future Love Letter.
Anyway…
I’ve loved to hate reading this poem (at least that’s what I think it is) that I came across on my timeline. It’s titled Seven Seas and it was written by someone who goes by the name Kente Elle, on her blog that’s called I Should Be Crying In The Shower.
The blog’s bio alone had me hooked. It goes, “Through my words, i aspire to live, not exist. It’s a struggle to hang in the balance like a drunk. One minute I’m suffocated by life, and the next I’m the empty vase basking on the marble counter. I write because talking and hoping to be understood is no different from a Catholic’s first day learning Latin, futile.”
Whew.
The poem itself is a beautiful work of written art and I loved how gripping it was right from the start to the end, especially how she used very candid questions in the intro and also as bridges between the stanzas. It’s packed with very vivid descriptions of feelings that I believe we have all encountered but would much rather forget.
So I hated how raw it was ‘cause I wasn’t ready to encounter such dark emotions articulated so vividly and yet so deliciously that I couldn’t help re-reading the poem as soon as I finished it. It felt like listening to The Weeknd but without any up-tempo beats to dance the melancholy away to.
Anyway I should have known what I was walking into when I clicked a link that literally said ishouldbecryingintheshower
And that’s it for today…
Thank you for reading this, I hope you loved it.
Until the next Busy Love Letter, I remain…
Yours busy in love,
The River Rwizi.
PS: You can also listen to this Love Letter here.
