Timestamp: Monday 31 October 2016 at 13:19

Whoa.

It’s been a month since I started this journey.  Interesting.  It has gone so much smoother than it has in the past.  I thank grad school for keeping me busy.  Really, I do.  Get me out of the apartment and on campus with something that can’t really play games, and, well, there’s not much of a choice in the matter.  I’ve been focused on this one thing as a goal, and it seems to be working so far.

Now we come to the hard part.  A full month, yay!  If the past tells me anything, I’ll get complacent in about a week or so and start slipping.  A few minutes here and there getting hyped over the next one to come out.  Midterms and projects are hard, I need to blow off some steam.  What’s a game or two for an hour going to harm?  I can control myself for a full month after all!  Suddenly, back right where I was a month ago.  Great.

Yeah, no.  Can we please not do this again?

NaNoWriMo starts up tomorrow, so that’ll keep me busy enough, for sure.  Ultimately though, we’ll probably have this conversation again next month.  Actually filling the void, starting to move myself from a mentality of “must resist the urge to game” to one where I’ve got so many better things that I want and love to do that I don’t even need to actively (or passively, for that matter) resist.  I think coding is trying to push into that space, and maybe writing once again will too, but it’s early yet.  I won’t be in grad school forever (thank God), so I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.

On top of that, the gaming aspect is the only area I’ve really made progress in this past month.  I’m still spending far more time on the internet than I’d necessarily like to spend.  There’s that idle time I don’t quite feel like being productive or rising or otherwise doing something useful that is still open.  I am a fair bit more present in life, but I did just lose this past weekend to trying to set things up at home to where I could still do things there.  More on that later.  I think I’m starting to get into that zone of just having things flow the best they can.

Getting out of bed by 0800?  Well, I’m getting there.  I think I’m on the right path for that.  Time will tell for sure, but I think I’m getting that part down at last.  Just within the last week or so, actually.  Still kind of anxious, but all I can do is keep the steps in mind, as tenuous as they are now.  Perhaps I should reread that book.  That sounds like a good idea.  I do also need to find ways to break out of the comfortable routine too.  Daring to Try is probably the thing I want to get into the mindset of most, but possibly the hardest piece of it.  It’s funny - we get stuck in our daily rituals and suddenly it’s a month later and you’ve forgotten all about pushing the envelope.

Some progress has been made in the past month, but there’s a lot more to go.