While it is common for a person to unconsciously open instagram or tiktok when bored, I open Z-library, and scout for books. Productive as this may sound, I have yet to read those books I've collected in my device. And then comes the question of space, both storage in my device and mental space, for whenever I download a book, leaf through it, and decide I'm going to keep it, I am not merely hoarding, but there is an implicit commitment to read it sooner or later. So it is that I organize my books in the filesystem according to topic, and those books that I store "for later" go into a backup in a hard drive, perhaps for a future when the free access to information becomes a thing of the past. But even the few subjects that I decide to keep around start growing on me, and every so often I need to go and prune the tree of topics and subtopics that so develops.
My mind is finite, my ability to focus and retain is fnite, and so is my time. I get tired easily, I need plenty of water, coffee, notebooks, and breaks, and I need a clear space to pick and choose what to do next. While I may focus, say, on the Russian language or maybe Chinese poetry, on the side there grows a library on chinese literature and culture, on budhism, on ecology, physics, chemistry, ancient languages, history, lisp, sociology, and many more new and interesting topics that keep suggesting themselves; I already resisted the urge to dive into egyptian history and, of course, hieroglyphs. So I have to prune. But even if I stick to a subject, the literature on it, as well as the ancillary topics, is vast and I keep finding more and more relevant or interesting books without any hope of ever getting to read them all. And so I have to prune. To pick and choose.
Indeed, sometimes a single subject may be enough for a hundred lifetimes. Take for example buddhism, with a tradition of nearly 2500 years and spanning a whole continent, and at least four very different cultures each with a vast literary tradition. I am not even a buddhist, I'd say I am more of a Taoist (though I must add that I do not subscribe to any one single system of thought), which makes me second-guess my interest in buddhism itself. A natural inclination would of course be Chan, or Zen buddhism, it being a blend of buddhism and taoism, but how could I understand Zen without a grasp of Mahayana, of the reception of buddhism in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and of the developments of Taoism itself from the Han dynasty onwards? And when reading Chinese Buddhism I am buffetted with specialized terminology from both Sanskrit and Pali. Maybe I am putting the cart before the horse, but this kind of rabbit hole is a bit of an inevitability for a person like me. So I go back to the root following Zhuangzi's admonition: 請循其本, Heaven knows I haven't finished reading Zhuangzi, but I am also wortking through Hanshan's poetry, and, if I am to follow my interest in buddhism and poetry, I would also read the Blue Cliff Record as well as Wang Wei's poetry, and since we are at the Tang now, I might read some Du Fu and his "historic" poetry, another source of pleasure. Time for a break, and when I come back I might listen to some Russian music, maybe read some научная фантастика, and work on the -again how many?- Russian language textbooks I'm using.
I happily proceed to brew another coffee, and hope I'm not damaging my stomach too much, maybe it would be better to do some gardening instead.