I’m 15 pages away from the end of my red comp book, which I have started filling up with three to six pages of fountain-pen-scribbled morning ramblings since June 15 of this year. I have impulsively titled the notebook UNPACKING in teal marker because there was space for a label. It was one of three red notebooks I made a close friend bring home from the U.S., which another close friend bought for me under strict instructions to only buy the ‘Made in Vietnam’ ones upon recommendation by /r/fountainpen community members. My inner perfectionist is fucking annoying.

There are technically 108 days from then until today, and I have made a total of 51 entries. I tracked my progress for the first time yesterday on a whim because I was getting a little better from a flu, and there was always this promise of trying to literally get better when one has survived a trying spell of some physical ailment or another. A flu is like being vacuum-sealed in an inescapable net of discomfort, which is even more infuriating than legitimate pain, because pain you can acknowledge face on, discomfort is less there, but no less debilitating. The few moments I forget that I’m sick, all it would take is a shift in position for me to remember that, Ah, yes, I am not okay.

51 journal entries felt incredibly surprising to me, and almost indicative of the kind of demons I fight, i.e. my feelings have nothing to do with facts. I always thought I was lagging behind. Well, I was, but not as bad as I thought. It’s the same feeling I get looking at my weekly and monthly trackers and seeing sporadic shaded boxes for things I swore to do every single day or at least every other day, like exercising or working on projects other than writing, or writing.

The productivity community has an amazing draw for me, because it’s exactly the sort of thing that can help ease some of my anxiety about not doing enough or not doing it right. I track things to motivate myself to do things I tend to forget, like writing or taking vitamins or water or exercise. But looking back at all my weekly review sessions, it’s always been, overall, disappointing, to see myself unable to fill those little boxes. So week after week I fail. It’s become so tiring I had to go back to why I feel like I needed to track these things in the first place.

Because I need to feel good about myself? So I can motivate myself to take care of myself? So I can somehow trick myself into doing things that are good for me? All these reasons feel valid to me, but they also mean I’m chasing after an outcome that I may not really feel beholden to. Because if I really feel certain things are important, why don’t I do them?

Back in my 20s I call it the curse of being at a 7. That’s when things are not necessarily crazy good, i.e. a 9 or a 10, but neither are they a 4 or a 5. A 7 is a much more misleading place to be. At a 4 or 5, you know where you want to go, to feel a little bit better. At a 9 or 10 you are living the life, cherishing the moment, etc. But 7, oh 7, what a strange thing you are. 7 is comfortable, nice, it’s the way things have always been outwardly for me. Effortless, cruising. I didn’t have a kind of past that had me transcending anything. I have always been pretty safe, pretty average, sometimes even brilliant, but randomly enough there’s no way I can predict or control how things turn out.

I get how having a reason to get up in the morning helps. Like maybe having someone who relies on you like a dog or an actual kid or a parent or your work team. But you do have to question yourself whether that’s all that’s keeping you going. Because if it is, and life takes them away, and life will, life’s a bit of a dick sometimes, what now? Why even bother? Yesterday I learned that my office mate’s 11-year-old kid died from a freak accident while away from home. That kind of heartbreak is inconceivable to me. How do you get up from that? Do you ever? Should you?

Why do we do the things we do?

If I think about it really well, and especially for a mild depressive like me, however good or bad things get, none of it matters if I keep defaulting to a state of discontent. A project succeeded? That’s normal, anybody can do that. A project failed? You’re a failure, you shouldn’t bother getting up in the morning. So maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t really matter what happens in the world, maybe all that matters is how you make meaning out of them.

Or even better, for the truly zen, to not attach meaning to any of them, for any experience is experience, and to be something that can experience anything at all is already too much of a fucking miracle.

Going by that protocol, how will life look like? The answer is in the question. How will life look like? How do you answer that? How do you look, really look, at life? And do you? Or is everything a check box to you? I can name one thing right now that I remember from my past with such vividness I can transport myself back there right now: my father’s hand as he lay in the hospital bed, and in an instant everything’s alive, the harsh lighting, the adjacent beds, the antiseptic smell of the nearby communal bathroom, the feeling of peace that at least in that moment things feel okay. How did I do that?

By being there. By really looking. To borrow the title of a book: ‘Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.’ It feels to me right now that it’s the only way to win over the tyrannical meaninglessness of life. And if by looking, you see God, or whatever powerful force of creation, or whether you see yourself in the thing you’re looking at, that’s all your doing, make no mistake about it. You call the shots here. Even your decision to ascribe this wonder to something bigger than you is YOUR decision. In the end, you will find out whether or not all your beliefs about the after life are true, but what happens to your soul is, if it is dependent on God’s judgment, then by definition it is completely outside of your control.

Therefore the only thing you can control is your now.