Bionic Teutonic

I’ve been thinking a lot about closing doors lately. I seem to have a lot of different things in my life that sort of half occupy my attention. I think that out of fear of letting anything go, I sacrifice having a deeper experience with any of my interests. Sometimes when you put some real parameters or limiting factors around what you are doing, it can free you up, though it seems counterintuitive. I’ve known this to be the case with music for a long time. In school we used to get assignments where certain limitations were placed on our songs in order to force us to better utilize what we did have to work with. I haven’t really ever placed those kinds of limitations on my life before though. While I get very obsessive about things, I don’t usually intentionally close other doors. I think sometimes I get afraid that if I let something go, I will never pick it back up again and it will just slowly fade away from my life. Which is kind of odd, because if it doesn’t tug at me enough to force it’s way back in, it probably doesn’t need to be there anyway (at least that’s how I’ve been feeling lately). I’ve always sort of romanticized this idea of the renaissance man. But I think for me, where I am in my life at the moment, that’s sort of a luxury. If you have a ton of free time, and/or have managed to create a work life where you get to dip into many different interests, this is a great thing to strive for, but if you are like me and spend most of your day completely removed from those interests, trying to cram them all in to the time you do have (also accounting for the need to just veg and recover from work sometimes), you end up making way less progress on things and having less satisfying experiences than you were originally hoping for. Sort of a jack of all trades, master of none scenario. I think I’m going to try and start closing some doors and seeing what happens. This sort of frightens me actually, but I think that fear is part of why I need to do it. To start practicing some more non-attachment.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.