When I was in grad school, I read about a book a day. These days I read about a book a week; much more than most people, of course, and it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable that that might be the right quantity of reading for me? When I made a list a few months back of what I wanted to spend large chunks of time on, books were fifth on the list, with an expected cutoff after the third item; I’m planning to give an update on that, but that is in fact how things turned out, and I’m comfortable with that.

The thing is, though, that I’m spending way too much of my time doing things that aren’t on that list. I don’t actually want to have my days completely full with doing top priority stuff, but reading books feels like a way to enjoy myself that would also leave me feeling good. So why am I not doing that more?

The best answer that I currently have to that question is that my brain is far too frequently being pulled by an urge to look up something with short term rewards / intermittent rewards. As a concrete example, I don’t actually think that it’s bad for me to spend some time each day reading Apple News; but it’s also something where I can imagine that I’ll find something new to read if I refresh it or scroll further down or whatever. So I’m doing something random (not planned focus work, something like walking the dogs or going to the bathroom or whatever), and I’ll be listening to a podcast (which is a fine thing to be doing in that context), and then somehow I’ll have my phone out and be reading Apple News or playing Flipflop Solitaire or whatever. And that’s bad for multiple reasons: I’m not paying attention to the podcast (and, if I’m walking the dogs, I’m also not paying attention to either the dogs or the world around me), but also I’m feeding / reinforcing the part of my mind that’s looking for new rewards.

 

I’m trying to avoid that sort of thing now: if I’m listening to a podcast, I want to avoid other technology-mediated distractions. (I.e. it’s fine to listen to a podcast while driving or walking or grocery shopping; but it’s not fine to listen to one while playing a game on my iPad.) The one exception that I give myself a free pass for is that it’s okay for me to review Japanese vocabulary while listening to a podcast; I honestly don’t know if that’s a great exception or not, but it has the advantages of being something that’s useful that I’m not doing enough of otherwise and also of being something finite if I can keep on top of it. (It feels like an infinite scroll, but then I make it through all four hundred twenty six items or whatever and it turns out that it’s not! Watching my mind react to it not being an infinite scroll is actually kind of interesting.)

I’m not completely successful at this: I’m getting much better at not looking at my phone while walking the dogs, but bathroom breaks and times like that are still a challenge. But I’m having some success even there.

 

I was out of town Friday through Sunday at a Nei Gong workshop. And, thinking about this sort of thing while packing for the trip, it seemed pretty reasonable that I could get back to my grad school habits and read three books during the trip. Friday was just a travel day; Saturday and Sunday I’d be busy during the day, but I’d have all evening to myself on Saturday and I’d be flying back on Sunday. And I don’t have any Switch games I’m actively playing now, so reading books felt like a fine thing to do during the non-workshop times?

Didn’t turn out that way, though. On Friday, I almost but didn’t quite finish one book; if Friday weren’t a total travel day, honestly that would have been just fine, but still, not bad. Saturday evening I got distracted by a phone game that I’m dipping into; that wasn’t great, though at least the part of the game that was distracting me was a skill-based aspect instead of an intermittent reward aspect of the game. (And I did finish the book from Friday.) On the flight home on Sunday I started another book but I didn’t get super far, a fifth or a quarter of the way through. So: more reading than normal, but not as much as seemed plausible in advance. This isn’t awful or anything, just a reminder that there’s a certain kind of mental stamina that I used to have but that I don’t have as much any more; I think it would be worth building that up again, and also to build it up again I’m going to have to learn to notice and then let go of mental pressure to follow a specific kind of distraction.

 

Though, even if I succeed at my goal of focusing more on long reading sessions, there’s another risk there: I might end up focusing on checklist stuff instead of just being. And that’s actually where I had an unexpected bit of happy success on the trip. A few weeks back, I read a post somewhere which, among other things, talked about how flying through the air is actually pretty cool, and a lot of us have forgotten that. So, for a while after taking off, I just looked out the window, and that was super interesting: first following parts of the landscape that I basically knew about but wasn’t familiar enough to be able to confidently recognize from the air (stuff like which town on the coast is Half Moon Bay); and then, as we went over inland California, seeing how the geography really shaped how people could use the lands (where the roads were, where the towns were, where the farms were). That was a great way to spend time.

On the flight back, as we were about 30 minutes away from landing, I thought “hmm, maybe I should pick up that book and read another story instead of listening to podcasts while doing picross puzzles”. (On which note: listening to podcasts is a fine thing, doing picross puzzles is a fine thing, but doing both at once breaks my current rule.) But then I remembered my experience flying out, and I decided to just look out the window again. And again, it was really neat; a different view this time, among other things because it was night, but I enjoyed trying to figure out what the lights were, and what the context was that they were embedded in. And then the lights got denser as we were getting closer to the bay, so I was trying to figure out what approach we were taking, and then once I figured it out (the plane was flying towards the southern end of the bay and then going up the left side of the bay), just watching and seeing a lot of territory that I’m quite familiar with and how it’s different from the air.

That would have been great, but it actually wasn’t the best part: I looked over, saw a stadium (it must have been Levi’s Stadium), and realized that fireworks were going off. It unsurprisingly turns out that seeing fireworks from a plane are really cool too, and they are something I’d never seen before.

And, if you’re in the mood to look for signs from the universe, I do appreciate that bit of positive feedback: yes, I made the right choice of just putting things down and looking out the window, and it was lovely of the universe to make that unexpectedly rewarding. I certainly won’t expect that as a matter of course; fortunately, even if the fireworks hadn’t happened, it still would have been a great way to spend half an hour.

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