Thoughts on balance, time, self control, ego, happiness, and death

Random thoughts about balance, time, self control, ego, happiness, and death:

1. I have this thing called asperger's syndrome. It's one of the things that I go to therapy for. One of the characteristics of people with aspergers is that they tend to get obsessed easily with certain things. For this reason, my therapist keeps pushing the importance of maintaining balance in my life. For instance, I got completely obsessed in 2001-2003 with becoming a great programmer. I was reading 2 huge books a week, staying up all hours of the night hacking away. I got really good, really fast, but in the end there was a price to be paid for this single minded obsession - other areas of my life began to suffer. I didn't pay attention to my body and got fat. My relationship with my then-girlfriend suffered and we wound up breaking up eventually.

Another example of this: Last year me and Effect became obsessed with sarging. We would go out and sarge the clubs a minimum of about 4 times a week, usually more. This went on for about six months. What happened? There were immediate benefits - I became more confident in social situations than I ever have in my life, in fact I consider this period of intense sarging the thing that helped me get over my social anxiety disorder. These days, I seem to be a lot more relaxed, confident, and comfortable around other people. I had a fun time and met a few girls too. What was the price? My job suffered, I wasn't able to focus as much as I should have because I was up all night at the bars, my finances were suffering because of neglect. There is also the random, free floating anxiety that pervades your mood due to the fact that you know your life is out of control.

Up until a month or so ago, I gave a fair amount of lip service to my therapist regarding the idea of balance - but in the back of my mind I would always think, 'yeah, but a single minded obsession is the way that great things are done in this world, like I bet people like Albert Einstein were obsessed or else they never would have achieved what they did'. And then, I don't know why it took thinking about guitar playing to hammer this point home, but I realized that my therapist was right and that, my inability to maintain balance was one of the big reasons behind my not being able to get to where I wanted to be by this point in my life in career, finances, guitar playing, exercise, etc.

This is the thought that really brought the importance of balance home: there have been times in my life when I practiced guitar 8 hours a day, I would improve at an impressive rate and friends would comment on how much better I've gotten in a short amount of time. Inevitably I would wind up focusing so much on getting better at guitar playing that other things in my life suffer - school, work, finances, my body, relationships, etc. And then an emergency in school or something would force me to spend less time practicing guitar. Sooner or later, my guitar playing takes a back burner while I put out these fires that happen while I spent so much time playing guitar. My practice time decreases and then I am only practicing once in a while. Over the course of time - what happened? My skills deteriorated, and I have improved less over the course of an extended period of time, than I would have if I would have only maintained a respectable and steady practice schedule of 2 hours a day. In the end the single minded obsession did not pay off.

Now I think, these people who have achieved great things that I admire so much - Einstein, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, whoever - I used to think 'I bet these guys have a razor sharp focus on what it is that they are passionate about', but now I think, 'yeah but I think they also have some way of maintaining some type of balance or they wouldn't have been able to maintain balance so long that they were able to manifest these types of results'.

2. The idea of balance is closely tied to self control. I was reading some blog entries on resilient's blog that had to do with the fact that the mark of a man is that he is in complete control of himself, and is able to focus his attention on things that he should be doing in order to realize his goals. For a while there, I was really rocking and rolling - I was doing good at work, taking care of my financial situation, doing my personal programming projects after work, on track to be totally cut by summer, in regular contact with my family, doing a lot of home renovations, and practicing guitar again on a regular basis and improving steadily. These are the types of activities that will get me where I want to be in the 7 areas of my life that are most important to me: career, finances, relationships, physical and psychological health, guitar, and home.

And then I got sidetracked - I got sick for a week with a virus (that I got from kissing my gf, or staying up all night with my gf) - then I spent about a month doing nothing but hanging out with my girl, neglecting my various projects, doing only the bare minimum at work. For a while I didn't care because I was enjoying all the free hooch. But inevitably my attention turns again to all of the emergency situations and things that are starting to get fucked up in my life. I am starting to focus on myself again, but for a while there I was less of a man. Even though I was getting laid and had this girl who wants to be my gf, inside I knew that I was less of a man because I lacked self control.

3. I once asked my gf, 'It seems like society's definition of happiness is very closely tied to the concept of romantic love - can a person ever be truly happy without finding love?' She said, 'yes it is possible, but not for me'.

When I look back on the past 4 weeks, and think back on all my past relationships in general, I would have to conclude that the concepts of romantic love and relationships, and personal happiness, are mutually exclusive. When I was in the midst of our first couple of weeks of sleeping over every night and having sex all the time - was I truly happy? The answer would have to be no. The only thing that improved about my life was that I was getting laid and, at least temporarily, did not have to worry about how I was going to get laid or my irrational fear of dying alone. Everything else suffered because I was so caught up in this new relationship. I even posted a few blog entries on here about how I was insecure about this new relationship.

4. Which brings me to where I'm at right now. As I told my therapist last week, I have to get myself together and find a way to balance all the various projects and responsibilities I have going on in my life, with spending time with this new person who seems to want to do it all day long. It's weird. I think I was at the point there where I was extremely focused, and could not be distracted from my goals. Not by self doubt, not by friends who just want to have a good time, not by my responsibilities to my family. I knew how to turn my attention to what I knew to be important to me and everything else be damned. So fate throws me a curve ball of this girl, because he knows the only thing that could distract me from the number one priority in my life, which is my own survival and self improvement, was sex, lots of sex. I have to get it together again, I have done so much in 2007, it would be a shame to ruin a really good year.

One time I asked gf, 'do you think I have it in me to be a great man?', she said, 'yes'. Then I asked her, 'if that's the case, then why haven't I already?'. She told me that everyone has to find their own way and sometimes your destiny unfolds according to its own schedule. Then she asked me why I am so obsessed with 'Getting Things Done', time, maintaining focus, the concept of balance. I told her because there is not enough time to do all the things I want to do in life, because I feel like I've wasted too much time already. She is someone who understands the ephemerality of life, due to her own experiences, I think this is one of the things about me that she empathizes with. I'm lucky that she is not someone who will not whine about me not spending time with her, as she is a really busy person, and with grad school and her triathalon training, arguably has more on her plate than I have. I know she would not appreciate a guy who cannot take care of himself or has no drive or ambition.