Ah, those final weeks before school starts again…

You somehow always manage to loaf your holidays away, and then, just as they end, you have that unsolicited epiphany that invariably comes in and nonchalantly sets your mind ablaze – ashes for the past, ardor for the future.

Now that I took 15 minutes trying to make that sentence acceptable, I forgot what I was about to say.

But it shall not matter, for I yet recall.

So it goes:

Lately, I’ve been living quite passively – existing more than living, one could say – and pursuing my goals in much an incidental fashion, focusing on some, neglecting other more important ones, or simply not doing anything valuable of my valuable time.

I would mechanically visit unrewarding websites (mail, social networks, forums) a hundred times a day and stargaze, far away from the pressing bubbling underwater.

Yet tonight I looked down, saw the bubbles pop out for attention (knew they were all along), and dove down to their source.

When I came back up, I took the most reinvigorating breath of fresh air I had had in a while. The same air I hoped I would breathe for the rest of my life.

*

A couple years ago, an extremely inspiring personal development article by Steve Pavlina entitled “The Courage to Live Consciously” made quite an impression on me.

Now I realize that I’ve been living passively, unconsciously, mechanically for quite an amount of time now, although not necessarily to such an extent as described in the article. For my part, I’ve let minor habits such as checking my mail or browsing through uninteresting websites nibble away at my precious time and dictate my day and life. It’s very easy to fall into full-on automatic mode and do the actions your brain knows to require little effort yet provide much distraction. Before you have time to think what’s best for you now, your mind is already engaged in some distracting activity it has chosen for you. As a result, you spend your days doing trivial things and progressing very little in life. You have the illusion of consciousness, but what you’re really doing is just blindly following your unenterprising brain into immediate pleasures of no durable value, finding numbing pleasure in the action itself rather than its reward. You slowly lose all of your goals, and end up a vegetable.

(I might have made it sound a bit more dramatic than reality, but I’ll explain a bit later on the purpose that personal illusion serves.)

Yesterday evening, I read a few insightful articles on BrainPickings, connected dots and was surprised to see how relevant they were to my lethargic lapse. I understood better why I had been acting that way, and how I could shift to a better lifestyle.

I was tired of being assaulted by insidious triggers left and right, all throughout my day, so I simply decided to put an end to it. I lay on my bed, reflected on what life had to offer and what I was currently making of it, realized I was completely free to make life as agreeable and fulfilling as I wanted to, and simply decided to do so. I had no obligation to follow the daily play of distractions, and could freely impose on myself performing only the actions I felt brought something to my life. You might think I would soon burn out, what with my obsession for productivity and all that, but having fun and unwinding was also part of my plan – it only needed to be the fun I wanted, and not that soi-disant “fun” distractions provide. I thus decided to operate a reset of sorts, and told myself I would think twice before doing any action – weighing the pros and cons, and only acting after expressing informed consent. Of course, it wasn’t a full reset, since I already had some good habits going on that I wanted to maintain. For instance, for the past week, I’ve been engaging in a curious exercise for an hour every day. I would study 10 words on the flashcard app Anki, then do 50 push-ups or whatever else, then go back to Anki, and so on. Skipping that exercise would mean missing two important tasks and breaking “Seinfeld’s chain” at the same time — the idea that the longer you’ve been doing something unfailingly every day, the more difficult it is to break the chain. In other words, it only made sense to carry on. In the same way, it has lately become a habit for me to sit down with a glass of water and start writing a post after a midnight snack.

Both habits have in common that they are my only focus while I’m doing them. This leads back to an article I read yesterday on BrainPickings, which stated that people who performed tasks without distractions were, in general, happier (I might or might not have radicalized the message). That brought me to my second big decision: from this point on, I would always give my full attention to the task at hand. That meant, among other things, cutting down on background music and never multitasking.

You must bear in mind that I made all these decisions while lying on my bed, and that this watershed moment was simply a mental realization, a mental statement, just like it had been a couple years ago, when I decided overnight to properly learn German (the actions followed).

I was so convinced of having made a life-changing choice, so convinced that I would really adapt my actions to my new thinking pattern, that my mood suddenly skyrocketed.

I decided to etch that moment in stone and mark that breaking point in my life more strongly by changing various of my online avatars and nicknames to covertly reflect my epiphany. From now on I would be different. A new outlook on life.

(As a sidenote, you now understand why I might have sounded overly dramatic in my previous description of the Dark Ages: the goal is for me to really feel like I’m not living that way any longer.)

Funnily enough, I must have spent an hour or so that evening obsessively (but consciously, with my inner mind’s express consent) searching the web for the image that would best capture my enlightenment. In the end, I just created my own by blending two images that each depicted one side of what I wanted to express: awareness and… fire. I then exercised with the aforementioned method from half past ten to half past eleven, and spent the rest of the evening writing part 1 of this article, as well as a jumbled first version of part 2.

Today, I have lived my first day as a conscious person.

It felt great.

Several times I caught myself absent-mindedly opening social networking websites, or just my mail platform, but each time I regained consciousness and closed the tabs before they had time to load. Uh-uh, cheeky old mind, not that time!

Before every action I undertook, I would tell myself “I’m consciously doing X, because Y”, and I would always fully focus on the task.

In the course of the day, I also got back to using to-do lists, in my case using the free application “Todoist”, which helped me get even more out of my day.

In spite of all that, I still encountered some resistance that prevented me from accomplishing certain tasks I had set (such as going out), so that’s an issue to be addressed. I guess it’s a good thing that I’ve already spotted and acknowledged the mental resistance. No false pretense that way. I shouldn’t take too long to act on it, though, lest I relapse.

It is one thing to act consciously, it is another to choose your conscious acts. By definiton, each one of them will be rewarding, but not to the same extent; rather, relative to your priorities, in the order of your goals.

Be that as it may, that first day was really refreshing, invigorating and motivating. I got a lot of things done and felt more alive than ever. I may not have acted with as much freedom, carelessness, brazenness as I had planned in my decisive evening, but I believe it’s a good first step in the right direction. I should just be careful that my consciousness grow and not degenerate in the next few days.

I’ll keep you posted!