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I've written about this before in my own journal, but I think writing about it here could be useful.
Every once in a while my mind pops into a state which I can describe in almost no other way than calm focus. To explain I'll need to set this up a bit more by describing my current life and normal state. I'm a middle-aged father of two younger children, so my day consists of little down or alone time, and as such, I'm always looking to the next task, whether that is the insurmountable to-do list at work, or the constant barrage of little-people interactions and corrections from my wife and I. I get up at 5:15 and I'm not done packing breakfast and lunch for the kids for the next day until 20:30/8:30pm. Needless to say there's not a lot of introspection in my life these days, and wondering about the world... or even taking a step back and calmly looking at your life almost in a third person perspective.
My mind is always thinking of something, and thinking I have a task that I'm not doing. I can relax and make time for myself, but my brain is usually so tired that I can't really focus on anything that takes high-level thought, such as contemplating your own situations in life, so I'm usually stuck in a "work" mode, and if you've read my entry on "work mode", you'll really understand what this is like for me¹.
So that being said, every once in a while I have these days, or moments of time, where all of this falls away, where the internal thinking-of-10-things-even-though-I-don't-realize-it mode is reduced to next to nothing. It's as if I meditated for an hour or more and cleared my mind of the internal chatter, but without the meditation. I can focus on the task at hand. I'm not concerned about anything else. And I feel more...alert to the world. It's at these moments that I write entries like this because I instantly feel like I need to document it, and because I can focus so well, I just (calmly) analyze this state of mind, wondering how I can jump into it in the future.
Another example comes to mind that's similar. I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but on a late summer evening, when the sun has just gone down, I sometimes like to go for a walk. It's that time of night where it's nice and warm and everyone is inside doing their nightly routines. The day was hot, but the evening/night is comfortable by comparison, and I simply stroll through the neighborhoods, letting my mind wander and wonder about the people that live where I live, how they got there, and how they see the world. Why do they have xyz outside their home/flat/apartment. Sometimes I have no thoughts at all and I just listen to the sounds, and let them invoke what they may. Those days are rare, and I relish them quite a bit, that's why I try to hold on to these calm-focused moments in my life, because they are so pleasant and make me think that the world, life, and existence is quite grand afterall.
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2024-07-16
Tags: #mentality #focus #calm #stateOfMind
Gritty
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