sweet ’n’ sour tape #6: mono no aware
It’s the night of February 15th. I’m watching Blair Witch Project with my roommate. We’re smoking and chilling, not doing much. In around 8 hours, I’ll be in the emergency room at Temple Hospital fighting a stomach virus. But right now, I’m just enjoying hanging out with my friend. But if I’m being honest with myself, maybe “enjoy” is the wrong word.
I’ve had trouble going to work consistently since I came back from India. I don’t know what happened, but it’s been super difficult to hit my weekly goal of 35 hours. Part of the reason I keep not going to work is cause of the idea that if I take a day off and work on my other creative pursuits, I’m investing more in my future and that’ll pay off. Except tangibility wise, I’ve only made one song since I’ve come back from India.
Those other songs and ideas didn’t work out for good reasons so I’m not too upset, I saw the quality and sound I need to go after and they didn’t fall in the purview of that. But the reason why the past couple days sting especially is cause for some reason I’ve lost all of my routines. My self-care and hygiene routines (I didn’t even shower for the past 2 days), my maintenance, my hours worked, and my musical goals. I’ve just done some busy work, done some daily dubs here and there like post fit pics or get all my maintenance done, and use that slight rush from accomplishing some tasks to basically coast the rest of the day.
In India, I had this vision for what it’d be like when I got back. I’d hit the ground running, just ready to execute everything I’d foreseen and planned for the three weeks I was there. Just as before though, most of those plans either morphed into something else or didn’t work out. And in your last tape, you showed how your first 2 weeks since 2020 had been: just the same as how a 2 week snapshot of your Daylio would have looked in 2019.
At first, I didn’t know what caused my slump. I’m not depressed or stressed. I don’t feel overwhelmed because all of my tasks given the time frame I set them within are doable. I don’t even feel afraid or frozen under pressure. Looking back, I think I literally just got comfortable, and in a weird uncharacteristic turn, I held onto that feeling instead of really doing more. We dubbed 2019 the “cozy” year, and I have a feeling that some of that energy was seeping back.
It wasn’t until I reread your tape that it clicked for me: as jumbled a mess as your tape was sometimes, it had some very true points about self-sacrifice, habits, and the battle to tame or be tamed by our environments. 2020 is not going to be a fix-all for our past mistakes and bad habits just through the sheer force of it ushering in a new and very, very, very critical decade for our goals, our lives, and our families. 2020 was an impetus to change, and that’s the mentality that we must remember. It starts like you said, with our environments and habits.
I was supposed to only smoke after accomplishing my goals for the day. I got comfortable and allowed myself to smoke before. So now I’m not smoking until spring break and from now on, I’m only copping once a month unless some special occasion arises. If I run out, I run out, plain and simple. I don’t want to spend more than the $25–30 I usually do and I want to ration it out in a way where I can be responsible and still enjoy myself. Maybe as I build my discipline more I can give myself a bigger reward, but that’s to decide later.
As far as environment, I’m not going to chill in the living room until my goals are done either. I’m going to eat or drink in the kitchen, and if I want to talk to you guys I’ll do it in your rooms or downstairs, but I’m not sitting on that couch until I’ve done what I need to for the day. Right now, sitting on that couch fires off the triggers in my brain to be comfortable and complacent, and I can’t afford that this early into 2020.
Despite what you think and what you’ve tried to tell me time and time again this month, discipline and willpower are not something you can reject. That’s just ignorant. These are the most powerful habits you can have of all, the ability to say no when faced with temptation and the ability to stick to our routines and behavior until they become innate. And funny enough, that comes through the practice and habit formation techniques you deify so much, and with good reason because I’m not knocking you there. One of my habits right now is cutting out sweets, and I started with no chocolate/candy, and I’m so good at that now that the very thought disgusts me. My next big goal are pastries; that will be immeasurably harder but I will reach the same place with them as well.
Willpower is resistance to the self-destructive practices of old, resistance that you’ve slowly built up time and time again throughout making those small positive changes and sacrifices, and slowly growing out of bad habits into better ones.
Discipline is the other side of the coin, maintaining the good we do regardless of environment, situation, or even comfort, because we acknowledge the benefits and rewards it brings us. I told you the story about our driver in India, how I was so impressed by how clean his clothes were everyday that I complimented him, and he told me this (I’m translating from Tamil):
Thank you so much, sir. At the end of the day, I always wash and press my clothes and wash my entire vehicle before the next morning. Regardless of how tired I am, I always make sure I do these two things.
This is a man in his 40s, with a family, who stays up till 10:30–11PM sometimes and wakes up at 5AM the next morning. And those numbers are not made up, they’re real times from the 3 weeks he spent with us, so I’m sure you can extrapolate how his other rides with different clients in the past have been. If this man can wash his entire fucking car at the end of a long day of being on the road before he even sits down to spend time with his family, we can do our fucking skincare routines, and write some emails, and chop some samples, and do the other tasks and routines we put off because we don’t feel like it or because we feel it can be done tomorrow. That comes with discipline, which comes through sacrifice, dedication, and quitting our bullshit.
In a way you’re right, because these aren’t necessarily “habits” of the variety you’re used to and have read about. They start off as such but evolve into something even more powerful and greater: character traits. And in my opinion bro, these are two of the most important character traits we can cultivate, and it might benefit you to take them on as two greater habits you strive towards and build through your smaller ones, as this is the perspective I’m going to move forward with.
It’s 7AM on February 16th. I’m in a hospital bed in the emergency room, have an IV in my arm, and across from me are my worried parents. I was rushed here around 5, when I woke up and I couldn’t see or walk straight, everything was spinning, and my stomach felt like it was going to burn itself up. Our roommate called 911 and he came with me in the early hours of the morning, contacting my parents to get them down here ASAP.
All in all, it ended up just being a nasty stomach virus. Couple hours later I’m home, where I sleep most of the day and eat nothing but soup (my first FAILURE of the month for Daylio yayyyyy :D). However, there was a few dark minutes before 911 came where I thought this might be my death. It’s hilarious now that we know its just a stomach virus, but my body felt like it was shutting down and I could feel myself passing out, so I think you can understand why I thought that, especially cause I was so delirious.
I remember literally thinking, “Damn, is this really it?” especially because I didn’t even accomplish everything I needed to the day before, and I had been lazing around for the past couple days anyway. I was terrified. I calmed down soon enough especially once I saw how casual our friend was while he talked to 911, but it definitely sobered me up and made me realize how much I need to quit my bullshit.
When I got home, I learned something horrible: this past Friday, my uncle had a heart attack.
He was still in the ICU, stable but still struggling to breathe on his own. As of writing this, my dad (his younger brother) said he’s okay now, cheerful and talking. I hope he’s going to be okay, but I couldn’t help but remember something my dad always told me when we would fight:
My father died in his early 50s, like a lot of the other men in our family. I might very well go during that time, too. I won’t be around to protect you forever.
My dad’s brother is 56, my dad is 53. They’re both diabetics with high blood pressure and in similar (read: poor) physical shape too; my dad might be even worse because he still smokes a shit ton of cigarettes while my uncle quit years ago. Imagine if the same thing happens, God forbid, 3 years from now to my dad. I don’t even know if I’ll be prepared to handle that. I’ll be the man of the house and officially responsible for my mother and brother, but I might not even be in the right financial, let alone mental, state to guarantee stability for them.
Time, bro. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Even removing the morbid lens that I’ve presented, I think it’s easy to forget how valuable time is, whether it’s because of how we see others spend their time or because we get lost in the heat of it all. I’m not in a position where I can afford to laze about, yet that’s what I was doing. I’m not in a position to put things off for tomorrow if they can be done today, or not divide up my time as properly as I should. I feel like learning the news abut my uncle, along with my own hysterical feelings of possibly leaving this planet forever, really straightened me out to where I need to be.
And the realization that I might lose my dad soon was the ultimate sobering and humbling moment I needed. If I don’t get to show him that his sacrifices matter and that I made something of myself, I’ll never forgive myself, especially if I know it was in my power to do so.
Time management is another head on the hydra of habits that we must slaughter. You were right when you said we were poor at it, but I didn’t fully realize how poor until the past couple days when I thought about how much time I’ve wasted. And that’s ignoring any relaxation time we’ve deserved, because recreation is definitely important. We’ve burned out before, and I’d rather not have to get accustomed to simply doing basic tasks of existence again because I didn’t stop and enjoy myself for a little.
No, I’m talking about time lost for no good reason, that we’ll never get back, and all we can do is try to remember whatever lessons we’ve learned from that and apply them in the future. Maybe we can think of good strategies to handle our time better, cause God knows we need it. We talked about holding each other accountable, but I feel like there’s been a lot of oversight in this area.
It’s already going to be March, which is the end of the first quarter of 2020. We’ll probably have a discussion about that anyway in the days to come, but all I can say is we need to really cleanse ourselves from our bullshit so we’re in the right head space to bring the quarter home and tackle the remaining months in stride.
The first two months have had a lot of good outcomes, opportunities, and accomplishments; we’re already off to a much better start than 2019. But just like you said last tape, we need to make sacrifices and admit that some of the bad decisions we make aren’t entirely our fault. But if there are outside factors causing us to fail bro, whether it’s people or environments or habits, they need to be quashed. Plain and simple, no exceptions. It’ll only hurt us in the long term, and since we can’t jump on our balls this year like every other year, we need to create a constructive environment around us like you mentioned.
Our 2020 and the rest of our lives, I believe, will be shaped by our discipline, willpower, and time management. It’ll be slow and difficult, but we truly owe it to ourselves if we’re as serious about this shit as we claim. If we can at least start to get a good grip on those difficult traits especially before March ends, I think we’ll feel a lot better about ourselves and everything we’ve signed up for, and a lot more prepared for our one-year goal, five-year goal, and the future beyond.
