Experiment #3: 750 Words (Days 3-5)

Well, I am nearly a week into my experiment with using 750 words, and I have finally hit the "uncomfortable stage." You see, one of the benefits of stream-of-consciousness journaling is that it is meant to be unfiltered. You can whine. You can curse. You can say all of those nasty things about yourself and about others that you'd never bother to say in public, because then, it becomes both risky and burdensome. On one hand, getting this garbage out onto paper--or in this case, on the internet--gets it out of your system, and onto a place that is both impartial and DOESN'T CARE. It won't chastise you for your foolishness, but it won't play to your ego and try to flatter you into feeling better, either. For me, what I'm left with is a certain sense of discomfort with myself.

It is around this time that I start editing my writing, if only in bits and pieces. I become more critical of the words that I choose, trying to make myself sound more intelligent for the benefit of an audience that doesn't exist. I pick apart sentence structure and punctuation. I start questioning the banality of the topics I choose to explore. Ha. I imagine that poets and writers do this kind of self-aggrandizement and subsequent self-deprecation all of the time. I wonder if this is why I never finished writing enough songs to constitute an album, or why I have had difficulty finishing any of my prior blog experiments. ...and then I laugh at my own romanticizing of this very common result of any awareness practice.

Eventually, with enough hard work and persistence, I would like to believe that we can take these moments of apparent weakness for what they really are. ...part of the creative process itself, perhaps? This is why exercise programs fail, why people never fulfill lofty creative goals, and why the pursuit of happiness can easily turn into settling for mediocre satisfaction with life. There is nothing inherently wrong in being happy right where you are, doing exactly what you are doing. There is probably something wrong if you wish you could do great things, and are too afraid to risk being uncomfortable, from time to time.

For what it's worth, there are links to the statistics for my last three entries at the end of this post. I have definitely gotten more negative, since Day 1. I started tracking metadata, which is not available on my share pages, but a few interesting things have already popped up. My happiness seems to be directly related to the amount and quality of sleep I had the night before each post. It is too early to make any conclusions about the optimal amount of sleep, for me, but I hope to gain further insight by the end of the month.

Cheers!

750 words: Day 3
750 words: Day 4
750 words: Day 5