gatling gun schedules

Most suburban denverites dutifully spend their 6 hours in front of the television and balance their careers with watching movies and driving their kids around. Their lives seem mundane to me, filled with a false sense of fulfillment and loaded with complacency. I have the opposite problem. I live like a stereotypical new york lawyer, frantically spending every waking hour in activity, suffering boredom like low-level trauma. I was talking to Charles recently about my hectic schedule. He sympathized, describing his as "gatling gun", and I thought that was a very good analogy. Our combination of economic freedom, mobility, and technology allows us to do more things at once and more things during the day than is probably healthy, but I can't stop. While it's probably an exaggeration, today I feel I'm an activity addict, Ayn Rand's perfect producer, a low level workaholic.

This was especially a problem during college, when classes and homework destroyed much chance for free activity and limited by extra-curriculars to the few and the chosen. I always thought when I graduated there'd be more time to manage, and while there is, I haven't done a good job of cutting the clutter out of my life.

The trouble is just that there's so much to do and so much life to live. Every inspiring story about any exciting accomplishment leads me to thoughts of doing the same - visiting different countries, hiking the grand canyon, spending more time volunteering, working harder to manage my money, playing more sports and starting a side business are some of the things I've struggled not to dream about this week.

This morning I frantically woke up and frantically got dressed before frantically driving to starbucks, which was closed, and then frantically made my way to the ridiculously early men's bible study which will the subject of a future post that I will never write. I was planning to duck out early to frantically head to a frantic day's work, but somewhere in the middle I decided not to. I stayed the whole time, even meeting with my "small group" to talk about the things going on in their lives. I decided I'd just be late to work, as late as I had to be, and that I was going to be present with these men now and listen to their stories. It was great. Nothing bold or excitingly spiritual happened, I just felt "present" and collected, calm, and at peace. I left feeling more in control of myself than I've been for a while, and the combination of grace and community lasted long enough to soothe my road rage on the way to work and is still keeping the chaos down.

I really want to try to live more balanced, do a few things well rather than many things poorly, but it's difficult. It takes more effort to let the little things go than I've realized, but I'm going to try and keep it up. If anyone has any tips on living balanced lives, I'd love to hear them.