Space, Time & Settling for Success

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths artists go to to ensure that their work gets done.

They seek asylum from intruding, outside thoughts by locking themselves in a room with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the antique crystal door handle. Sometimes, promises of rewards, from dessert and alcoholic treats to television remedies, are made to follow after their thoughts are finally put at ease and organized. In most cases, nothing even gets started, putting off finishing whatever for another day, cutting even more work out for themselves.

This itself is one of several attempts at articulating the strategies and perspectives I have used to make progress in my writing, running/weightlifting, art, and any other expressive endeavors (don't worry, I'm not trying to sell you anything!).

Dwelling in my own personal home office space, waiting for the inspiration to gift itself to me, I regularly fall victim to complicating what I am trying to communicate so concisely. Flowery language, poetic imagery, stream of consciousness descriptors, all qualities of pretentiousness I mock but wish to emulate from my favorite authors.

But, without muddying my message any further, my thesis in this post is laying out the part physical spaces play in designing our habits, the idealisms we hold ourselves to when measuring one's potential, and even how settling for less than perfect in constructive ways is the healthiest choice.

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First, a little about me. I created this personal website, and in turn this blog, to showcase the best attributes of myself. Mainly presenting myself for potential employers, I wanted a catalog of everything. My accomplishments, my articles, my art, my humor, my ideas, my summative experiences. Everything, all of it.

Which brings me to my most highly held activities, passions, and four pillars of personality: writing/storytelling, running and occasional weightlifting, art, comedy. And what I wish to learn, develop, and grow these favored skills can easily be summarized as well: Everything.

• I want to write blurbs, news articles, editorials, essays, short-stories with fully fleshed out characters, novels, screenplays, trilogies, sagas, epics.

• I want to run, run fast too, run fast over short distances, run fast over long distances, run 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, full marathons, run competitively, run for fun, run myself crazy.

• I want to draw, what is in front of me and in my head, use paints, chalks, charcoals, pencils, use a brush or a pen, paint murals, sketch likenesses, draw abstractions, draw from the perspective of how I see things in the world.

• And, lastly, I want to make people laugh through comedy, make my friends laugh, make people laugh at parties, or at shows, spitting satire, penning humorous stories, thinking on the spot, collaborating with other people to create something plain and simple funny!

I end up wanting so much from these experiences, I do not know where to start. I end up not knowing what I want to write about or getting discouraged because I'm not running as fast as I did in high school or not drawing enough or sitting down to fine tune and craft a joke. I've defeated myself and lost a hiking boot before the journey began.

There is no designated areas to be creative, funny, witty, or agile. Which is exactly why we have to make them ourselves!

As a surface-level observer to feng shui, an Eastern practice of harmonizing energies of the individual and their surrounding environments, I believe the spaces we occupy play a large role in our motivations. Organizing a bedroom or cleaning the entire house is a cliche taken right out of the Procrastinator's Handbook...as there is some truth to it. How can I force order onto my thoughts when my room is in disarray, clothes on the floor, shirts waiting to be hung back up, an unmade bed?

Senior year of college, before returning for my last semester, I spent my last day home switching out my old bedroom furniture with the furniture in the guest room (which was also old furniture). What I needed most was a dresser that was not the same dresser I kept my clothes in since I was a kid. A 21-year-old slept in that room, but the dresser and wooden bookshelves made it appear as if a ten-year-old lived there instead. It was a a slight frustration constantly on my mind whenever I opened a drawer and fumbled for a shirt to wear.

Almost four years later, I have probably re-structured my room a dozen times since. It is the space that is supposed to represent and accommodate me the best. Tetris in-real-life is played configuring the best positions for posters and frames on the wall, where to fit a table and how to declutter it. Always a work-in-progress, as is life.

Amidst the pandemic, me and my dad took on a handful of home renovation projects. We were gardeners, weeding and mulching the greenery areas around the exterior of our house. We were lumberjacks, collecting stray sticks and branches to dump in the woods behind us after our oak tree split in half from the inside during an asymptomatic thunderstorm. We ran an underwater salvaging operation, evacuating the items in our basement from one and a half inches of water our water heater blessed us with overnight.

The assignment I was most invested with for my own sake was converting our guest bedroom into a personal office space and art studio. In here, I am typing away at a desk, not at a dining room table, or my sinking couch, or even from bed. A real desk. A really real desk I had in college but did not get much work done at.

There - here, for transparency's sake - I can orbit around the very same tools by which I mean to be creative. There is an overabundance of tools, in fact.

All my art supplies nestled together, colored pencils alphabetized next to the numerically divided ink pens which are neatly assembled on my desk and away from the "regular" office utensils. A tripod with a condenser microphone tucked into its grip hangs over the desk, casting a shadow on the basic audio interface, the equipment I used to invent podcasting in 2020. Framed movie posters, pieces from favorited online artists, and even the promotional art for the 1976 U.S. tour for the Treasures of Tutankhamun museum exhibit adorn the wall. Canvases and other drawing mediums reside within a wooden crate, a refitted toy chest my uncle made for me inscribed with a note from "Santa's Elves". One plastic shelving unit buckles to to contain the shoeboxes of random electronics' charging cables, stacks of novelty magazines with picturesque covers I have picked up over the years, and a bin of old school notebooks.

Following my gut instinct for spatial reasoning, I gave breathing room to each type of creative desire. Too much overlap, and they might start to suffocate each other. I compartmentalized corners of the room to serve a purpose: desk for writing, some introductory recording hardware for podcasting, a table for various art and drawing, and four walls to display expressions of all this through. If you are asking where I run, the answer is easy: Anywhere! Save for some ancient workout gear I use in my basement for lifting, everywhere is my playground for running, utilizing my neighborhoods and local parks.

Although, offices are a luxury. Not everyone can afford to dedicate an entire room to a sole activity. Take the inspiration where you can get it! Frequent a creative venue, like a coffee shop or community art studio, find comfortable nooks and crannies to get away from distractions, or make room for the space by temporarily re-arranging furniture for a few hours to do what you need to do!

In the words of goodfella "Shoeless" Joe Jackson from "Field of Dreams" (1989): if you build it, they will come.

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Celebrated mythologies of "the artist, the author, the visionary storyteller" pollute discourse on healthy processes to achieve greatness. In reality, these heroes of ours are nationally revered manics alleging particular criteria need to be met to meet the demands necessary to produce their craft.

Aspirers are told Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson resigned themselves to a study, far and away from interruptions; left to ponder, they waited for the words to actualize in front of them and then captured them on paper in a flurry of typewriter strokes. Young people are told these harsh self-critics such as Kurt Vonnegut used time spent in solitude as a catalyst agent to bind the atmosphere of thought to the climate essential for ideas to thrive and explore, creating a perfect ecosystem. Those with a liberal arts degree are told words and colors, not cells, are the building blocks of life given to the intangibles.

Although, these are the same reasons we celebrate their authors, their abilities to detach themselves from normal social conventions. They are praised for burning their candles at both ends because that just means someone else did not have to. These behaviors are irreplicable. Anyone who elevates their writing sessions as pure enlightenment, but whose only safeguard is a flimsy doorknob, deserves to have an "intruder" accidentally walk in on them and detract any of their progress.

Focus on finding what is best for you.

Besides, what solitude actually looks like is me rapidly tapping my foot in my flip flops on the hardwood floor and discovering new ways to organize the material possession I feel are cascading on top of me.

High school and collegiate habits of lost sleep and deprivation ingrained itself in my writing style for a long time, romanticizing some idea of an edge and some big truth I was chasing the closer I approached to challenging a deadline. Instead, it made me loathe writing and act reluctant to begin the process when assigned. Similar to Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond 007 novels, who would lock himself in hotel rooms of non-descript towns until he was stark raving bored enough to start writing!

An office or your own criticisms, a self-constructed courtroom of accountability is fine, but don't start forcing yourself to get things done once it becomes unenjoyable.

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After establishing a space with fruitful access to inventive devices, then comes the issue of how you choose to manage your time to achieve your goal. You can have all the resources in front of you, but what you cannot capture or put on pause is the element of time.

My inner quarrels are typically with how I ultimately end up wasting time. One of my opening lines to a therapist a few years ago was admitting I felt there was never enough time in a day, or even my lifetime, to do all that my passions encompassed. That previous theme of wanting everything out of an experience turned on itself when I realized I would always be playing catch up to the infinty of books, music, movies, people and relationships waiting in the world for you.

This is the burden of time. An underlying impossibility of a "Perfect Day".

For the longest time, I imagined it paramount to fulfill the outline of a "Perfect Day", golden in its daily triumphs, to ever think I had a shot at keeping up with the pace of my own dreams. Coherently, a "Perfect Day" is what I conceive to be my ideal usage of time, from the moment I wake up right to when I fall asleep.

A "Perfect Day" always starts by waking up at some seemingly ungodly hour before 7 A.M. (I like to think I'm capable of waking up at six or even five-thirty A.M.). From there, I either go for a run or go on a long walk, where I can catch up to current events by listening to podcasts. If not already employed, the rest of my morning is utilized by drafting articles, pursuing sources, researching topics, and applying for jobs. I switch between shifts of drawing or painting and reading in the afternoon. In the early evening, I lift at home using the shabby equipment we have in the basement then proceed to throw together a home-cooked meal. The rest of the night is spent either reading or crossing a movie off my watchlist. Put head to pillow with the idea in mind that I can do this all over again the next day.

I'm currently laughing, having realized how insurmountable I have made this reasonable routine out to be in comparison to Mark Wahlberg's literally impossible schedule he made public. Critics have commented on how comically unrealistic the actor's day-to-day is.

An itinerary of ideals, this is very much an ideal-ology.

While still possible, a "Perfect Day" suffers from high likelihoods of hinderances and excuses, willing itself to be a sort of De-Motivational Zone. Full nights would be spent forecasting how tomorrow will be the first "Perfect Day", starting the week off right. Squirming, unable to fall asleep, I full well knew sleep was impossible and prematurely concluded I was not getting up early enough to satisfy the "Perfect Day" Colossus. The "Day" was lost before it started.

The potential of one full day would be scrapped, the rationale being there was not a proper beginning to the day to justify its triumphant conclusion when the Moon was in the sky. I would delay any redemption by promising tomorrow, then the next day, to rectify, eventually writing off the entire week as a loss.

I sense this section turning into its own De-Motivational Zone. To which I prescribe a form of relief. There can be no cure-all for lost time: you cannot get it back you can certainly throw it away. And how to use it is a life-long lesson. Find strength in the ways you already manage your time. Discard the "Perfect Day" for a "Non-Zero Day".

I choose to focus on the philosophy of a Non-Zero Day, where every action as little as putting together a home-cooked meal is weighted as significantly as completing yard work or job applications. Ever relevant for this never-ending pandemic, or individuals struggling with depression and anxiety daily, a Non-Zero Day aids in lowering the stress we place on ourselves. By shifting perspectives of what I little I got done into seeing myself for maintaining functionality from the day-to-day, like getting up early, dressed, and fed, it improved my mood and re-invested energy into tackling tasks throughout the rest of the day.

Meditation, mindfulness, sunlight, bare minimum of light exercise if possible, and moderation are low risk-high yield behavior enhancers. Would love to go in-depth about those another time!

The blueprint to my "Perfect Day" stemmed from the inability to harness every second of every minute of every day to my benefit. Or to practice what I preach and put it in less existential terms, I am just an average 24-year-old lacking time management skills, a common trait of my generation and not a dire fault.

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Steve Prefontaine, a boundary-pushing American distance runner from the 70's, was quoted as saying "The best pace is a suicide pace, and today is a good day to die." Prefontaine's perfectionism was incredibly flawed, living out each second of each lap in a mental headspace before every race, only to abandon his models for sure victory for the pure passion and thrill he wringed from every mile. He did not want to plainly win or run the perfect time, but do so according to his terms. In Prefontaine's case, he tragically went out in a blaze of glory but not before leaving a "Fire on the Track".

One of my tenets I attribute how I perceive success, running is the most peculiar. After a run or a race, you are just returning to the location you started at. You can fill up a log book with all your miles, times, and workouts, but it is not the same as filling up legal pads, sketchpads, and notepads with stories, drawings, or jokes. Unless you are winning medals or strangers are handing you hoagies every Tuesday jog through town, there is nothing to show that you have traveled that distance.

Author Malcalm Gladwell phrased the dogged persistency of running culture in a way my younger self would be irate over: "I would rather be a mediocre runner than a good one." Among Canada's fastest high schoolers distance runners of his time, Gladwell eventually chose the career path of a writer, reasoning that he would have to spend hours running hundreds, thousands of miles, to shave mere seconds off his personal best times. And would all that devotion be worth it? Former Nike Oregon Project runner Mary Cain - now sponsored by Tracksmith whose ads Gladwell narrates - can best represent the ambiguous nature of such a question. A world phenom at the age of 17, even she had to re-evaluate her commitment when Nike coaching drove her to an eating disorder, numerous other health issues, and falling into a relationship of abuse with the sport she loved.

As I continually re-emphasize, find what works best for you. Do not apply the logic of legends to yourself. That is how you will encounter the real enemy: Burnout.

Burnout occurred more as a reality than a fear of mine. Oh sure, I feared it, but I never considered I was well into exhibiting symptoms till now. Late nights, putting off starting, the pressure. I could sustain that level of success, only at that rate though. There was no way I could expect to live up daily repetitions day in and day out.

Prefontaine never knew his boundaries. But you and me are not Olympians. The need is greater for us to find our boundaries and place headlights atop them to prevent us from crashing into them.

Scrambling to finish everything even with all the time in the world, we never breathe and contemplate how thin we are stretching ourselves. Too thin. Past stability. And to exasperation.

Movers and shakers are what dramatized movies and television stories tell us we should be. We can "have it all" where we are fighting all day long, on our feet all day for the grind of the job. Sun up, out the door with coffee in hand, until sun down. The art of the hustle has us envisioning these versions of ourselves, where we are fighting all day long, and then in our spare time we are weekend warriors, the battle of our ambitions never stopping.

Sleep is burnout's greatest deterrent. A young professional may keep up this beat in their career, but only for so long before their lack of a circadian rhythm catches up to them. The same art of the hustle comes down to the quality of sleep one allows themselves and their resolve to get out of bed in the morning. It's eye opening how many years I spent following the guru's mantra of sleeping in, all for a few more hours of shut eye. I was definitely getting too much poor quality sleep, brought on by inconsistent sleeping patterns. Other wise known as, college.

If a "Perfect Day" measures the potential we possess, then burnout measures the potential we have to lose by not respecting the interdependence of the mind and the body. In an earlier draft of this guide, I likened the excruciating weight of burnout and lost potential as another instrument we use against ourselves to undermine our own progress:

"We are the sums of ourselves, and it is much easier to divide our worth by contrasting what little we have done so early in our lives to the totality of potential we hold after living the full human experience. Instead, we should be multiplying what we do have by the variables of limitless prospects that are in front of us. Embrace the uncertainty."

"Tired bodies are tough bodies" and "strained minds are smart minds" are simply not wholly true anymore. Permit another perspective shift to lighten the load you feel by taking on less. Haggle with yourself to think constructively. Only the few things you value and hold dear are worth completing at 100 hundred proficiency, it makes everything else easier when you realize when it is acceptable to settle.

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My greatest mistake has been choosing insanely particular things that are insanely hard to excel at. I beat myself up for the days I take off from writing, I imagine my body inflating whenever I skip a workout, paintings gather up dust in my inner vault because I am unsure if I can bring them to fruition......oddly enough, my sense of humor is always here.

Spurts of power and excitement fuel them, but my determination directs them. There is balance to all of these activities. Bursts of feverish enthusiasm for every quiet lull. I find that there is a new chunk of information about myself I find when I am patient with myself and come to a breakthrough in any of these fields.

Notice the ebb and flow. I dwell on what I plan to do and analyze what I have done in the past. I can look forward to it every day. I can even undo weeks of hard work at the whim of negative thoughts. For any one's flourishing leaves another susceptible to withering.

College is when the juggling act of balancing all four of these angsts collided. The periods when I was not covering journalism stories or painting for hours in an art studio, I was training on my own. When opportunities to write about breaking news presented itself, I was in a comedy troupe and taking oil painting courses, but running had taken a backseat to all that. Now, I am the certified funny friend in our social group, who struggles to find inspiration for drawings or writing samples, and exercise is always on my mind.

Other things are on my mind, too, but hopefully this guide can extend some insight into how you can process what is on yours too. Currently, I need to excuse myself to watch more X-Files. Good night!

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