Well... That was a failure.
But - I still think that it's useful. I think there's definitely lessons to be learned,
and I would definitely encourage people to try this experiment.
It is eye-opening.
The first thing that I realized first thing in the morning was that I forgot
some of the chores that I would normally do first thing in the morning.
Startin' off real strong, Lefie!
In general, across the entire day, none of the foods that I had
written down for my ideal day were actually completely
available in my fridge.
That's on me, I should have planned better, but this was kind of a last-minute experiment.
Fortunately though, even with these mishaps, I was ten minutes early
for this first portion to be done, so I decided to drive to
the beach early, and it's a good thing that I did,
because it actually took 20 minutes longer than I thought it was going to take.
And here's the biggest lesson that I learned from all of this: I got to the beach,
sat down on the beach, watched the surfers -
I wasn't actually planning on surfing, because I don't have any of the equipment, but
as I sat there and watched all the surfers out on these huge gray waves,
I was not at all envious of them.
I did not want to be out there with them.
I like the IDEA of surfing, but I guess I would rather have it be an
occasional once-a-week thing rather than an everyday thing.
It was definitely fun to be out of my apartment bright and early,
I liked that I was surrounded by nature, I was able to look at the ocean,
so I would like to keep those aspects still in my everyday life,
but actually going out there and surfing everyday is not anything that I aspire to do anymore.
Plus, driving there felt like a commute: a morning commute.
So my idea now, to replace what I THOUGHT would be ideal in the morning,
is that I would still want to get out of the house, I would still want nature in the morning,
and I could still listen to KEXP, but
the change would be that I would walk to a local gym, somewhere in a 20-minute radius of where I live,
and spend time just weightlifting at the gym.
It would be even better if there was some kind of class that I could take at that time,
because then there would be a sense of community and there would be that social aspect
that you would get if you were surfing.
So in general, already, off-the-bat,
I already knew: no to driving, no to surfing,
yes to locality and community, yes to getting out of the house in the morning,
uh - I like walking, I still want to listen to that radio station.
Which by the way, they have an app - so I'm listening to it on my phone.
By the time I got back to my apartment, I was already an hour late,
an hour off of where I thought I would be
in the schedule I came up with in my "imaginary dream world."
So in order to feel like I was making up the time,
I sped through all of my - rest of my morning activities.
And I don't like rushing through all of that stuff. I feel like I wanna take my time with it.
I started working as usual and ate more food at some point.
I did love not spending a lot of time cooking. I'm just not a big fan of cooking.
I also went for a gorgeous walk in the afternoon, and I don't
always get to this, but whenever I do get out for a walk, I'm so much happier.
I just love looking at all of the plants. There are so many cool plants around here.
And I could see incorporating other things in that walk.
So if I want to meet up with somebody for a coffee, or if I want to
spend some time doing some life drawings at the park, or
one of the touristy places, I think that would be a good thing to stick in the middle of that walk.
So, for the three questions that I had prior to this experiment:
this is what I thought was going to be my ideal day,
and then this is what it turned out to be with all of the changes.
Now of course, the new version has not been vetted yet,
so I think it would be fun to try this new version out, maybe in a couple of months,
maybe we'll wait until January, and I'll (in the meantime)
check out some local gyms, see if I can find one that I like,
and probably I should go grocery shopping.
The second question was "is this ideal day achievable ACTUALLY, physically, in terms of time?"
And the answer is no.
The third question was "do I feel any differently afterwards?"
And the answer is...
Yeah! I think I do.
This really helped me to distinguish what it is that I ACTUALLY want
verses what it is that I THOUGHT that I wanted.
If you're interested in trying this, I would say don't just do the first part,
don't just try to come up with your ideal day,
but actually go through the motions of it and see if there's some
differentiation between what you THINK you're interested in and what you actually want to do with your time.
Try it out, put it to the test, and
either you're going to make your dreams into reality
(which would be awesome),
or your'e going to disprove that ideal and it'll make room then
for you to come up with what the NEXT ideal is.
Eventually, you might be able to find something that's actually achievable.
That's it for now.
'til next time!
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