My preferred troubles

So, what trouble am I choosing? What direction am I headed, what do I want to become?

First, I’m choosing the trouble of writing this blog. I would like to become a person who has a wide network of people to talk to about areas that interest me, and one way to signal what kind of things I’d like to think about is to publicly share my ideas and questions.

Second, I’m focusing more on my health and fitness. I’ve started seeing doctors who focus on functional medicine— not just curing disease, but actually working toward better health and prevention— and returned to group class exercise after an almost complete hiatus during the pandemic.

Third, I’ve signed up for a number of classes. Two are on Eastern European/Russian literature, one is on the toxicity of the wellness industry, particularly within the yoga community, and another is on a novel related to the environment/climate change. My goal with these classes is not just to provide some rigor and structure to my reading, but also I’m trying to engage more actively, to be part of a community of learning. It’s always on my ‘someday, maybe’ list to get another degree, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary, or if I should just be more active within less formal learning environments.

Perhaps more importantly, there are a number of things that I often trouble myself about that I’m working to actively ignore. I’m not purchasing anything new for my wardrobe— I have tons of clothing, much of which admittedly doesn’t currently fit, but I’m not working to optimize, improve, replace, etc. We’ll see how long I can hold out— I caught myself the other day going through a favorite website’s clothing and filling up a cart. But instead of hitting purchase at the end, I just abandoned it. It’s key for me to remember that I have plenty of stuff to wear, and I was never a particularly ‘trendy’ dresser anyway, so it’s not like the style fluctuations matter all that much.

Second, I’m limiting the time I spend optimizing organization. This is a FAVORITE activity of mine to feel productive, and it’s highly satisfying to look at a cleaned up space when I’m done! But the truth is that doing that often crowds out higher value activities, activities that admittedly take more energy. So I’m doing my best to limit organization work to time that would otherwise be completely wasted— the 15 minutes before we have to leave to go somewhere, for example, when there’s no point in starting any deep work, but I do have things I can do that are more useful than scrolling on my phone.

Finally, I’m also avoiding buying stuff for the house as much as possible, too. I’m contemplating publishing a list of everything I do buy, to hold myself accountable for the expenses and make sure I feel like I need a thing enough to tell others about it.