Shaking the Dust Off – Motivated Nonsense
This is going to be one of those blogs where I ramble on and on to myself and try to stay motivated. Will it work? Find out by reading all of it.
Sarah and I have had a kind of recurring conversation about looking back at our time together and nostalgia in general. I think looking back is only natural as the year winds down. I even keep a little list of cool stuff that’s happened over the year to take a look at as the new year approaches. I don’t like being “stuck in the past” but I like kind of going over the things that made me happy in the past. I think there’s kind of a proactive way of doing it, one where you avoid getting bogged down in just reliving former glories.
If you take stock of the good times, the things that you found were rewarding, you might be able to focus your efforts into pursuing similar things in the future. At least, that’s the theory.
It seems that as I work my way into my mid-30s I am more and more likely to get trapped in that mindset of “things were better when…” You know, when everything seemed simpler? When there were always a friends hanging out to meet up with? When there weren’t so many bills to pay? When we all got together to watch a movie because there was only one copy of it on tape in the whole city?
Life used to be like a loose bag of Legos. You could put it together any way that you wanted to. It always seemed like it would be easy to just quickly pull it apart and make something new if you didn’t like what was happening. But now it’s this complicated Lego tower and changing any of those blocks way down at the bottom seems nearly impossible.
So maybe it’s not the end of the world to take a look at your Lego tower and relive the parts that you’re happy with? There’s still a lot of tower to build. Maybe it’ll be easier if you focus on building up the good parts.
That metaphor worked out better than I expected.
Time Keeps on Slipping
I have this tendency to feel guilty for wasting my own time. Even though I have a hard time figuring out what isn’t a waste of time. I tend to kind of equate working on the website as “not a waste of time”. But at the same time, there is such a small amount of feedback that ever comes back from any of this, maybe it’s the biggest waste of time there is?
What the hell happened to the days where we were all commenting on each other’s LiveJournal posts? Where even the most innocuous little blog could spur lively discussion. Now so much of it is reduced to Thumbs Ups and GIF reactions.
There I go again, waxing nostalgic about goddamn LiveJournal.
There’s this thing that happens where all of sudden, you’re older than most celebrities. It was only recently that I really started to notice that most pro hockey players are younger than me. Even players that are considered veterans in the league. Shea Weber is a little more than 2 years younger than me and Habs fans are so quick to slap the “too old” label on the guy.
You see rockstars, athletes and actors all “making it” and they’re all a decade younger than you are. How do you not start to think that your own personal window for greatness is closing (if its not closed already)?
Sarah’s like a shark. Moving forwards all the time and not wasting too much time looking at the past. Her argument is basically that when you’re taking time thinking about the past, you’re wasting the present and the future.
There’s probably a way to balance the two.
The old cliché of “it’s never too late to bla bla bla” comes to mind.
Take a look at what used to make you happy, what still makes you happy, and do more of it.
That’s all I got.
Keith does all sorts of things here on 9to5.cc, he works with the other founders on 9to5 (illustrated), co-hosts our two podcasts: The 9to5 Entertainment System and Go Plug Yourself and blogs here as The Perspicacious Geek.
