Life is all there is (a stolen expression)

For a bit here, things were starting to fall into place. Life almost seemed easy by comparison to how it’d been the past few years.

Is this true? Or was I simply settling to the bottom of the jar? Was I just becoming complacent?

All it took was one conversation to shake me from all the thoughts and opinions I’d built out for myself. At first it was frustrating as my brain tried to defend all the things that I’d thought I’d figured out, but later it became humbling more than anything else.

There are many sides to every situation, and at first we only see one. We can continue on like that, but it’s in our best interest to talk to others and try to see some other angles.

Evolving, ever evolving, and I’m thankful for that. I’m just glad that this time these realizations came from a friend.

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More slowing down has been happening in the way of adding more steps to the things that I normally “do.”

I put that word in quotations because it’s actually a really complex concept, i think.

Yesterday I read an email from two developers of a book tracking app I’ve been using. They did a tandem Day In The Life update to show what a typical day for them looks like while working on the app.

It made me consider what my typical day looks like (and in one sense, would i want to share that? more on that later).

Every moment is a decision waiting to be made, both big and small. I was thinking about the small things more than the big things, because I feel like those are more significant at the end of the day.

Anyway, lately I’ve added a few steps onto my music listening “do” in the form of actually keeping a personal library of music instead of streaming everything. Some of that music comes from my own personal collection of CDs that need to be digitized and then placed in a folder on my phone so I can listen to the music anywhere.

There’s quite a few steps involved in this, and it takes time, and some would ridicule this effort in our world of streaming. For me, it’s removed a huge stone of anxiety from my shoulders.

I’m very susceptible to task paralysis (rats) and I’d found that, when presented with every single song in the world at my fingertips, I could no longer listen to music at all. Even when I did listen to something I quickly lost interest, because part of me felt like this music was a service to be consumed (which it now is) instead of art to be experienced.

Side note: Fuck Spotify. The whole “Wrapped” feature, while novel at first, encourages people to listen more and more and more with the only goal being to show off to other people. Yeah, that’s a cynical take, but that’s what hyper-consumerism is. Ingestion without real purpose.

I’m not saying my way is better, because many people are happy to stream on Spotify and Apple and whatever else, I’m just glad I found something that works for me and feels a little bit more special each day.

After all, life is all there is.