Bread and data

Metatonia

You'll never change your life until you
change something you do daily. The
secret of success is found in your
daily routine.
-John C. Maxwell

[We must admit that the solutions for many unsolved questions are in nature, and the rapid increase in machinery are not enough to bring about a worry-free life. This new machinery is not only unable to reduce suffering in the world, but has brought with it many new problems and uncertainties...]

In the past decade, our understanding of the neurology and psychology of habits and the way patterns work within our lives, societies, and organization has expanded in ways we couldn't have imagined fifty years ago. We now know why habits emerge, how they change, and the science behind their mechanics. We understand how to make people eat less, exercise more, work more efficiently, or in my case, stop being a deadbeat. Transforming a habit isn't necessarily easy or quick. It isn't always simple, but it is possible.
Habits, they say "It is both a blessing and a curse." I created a sort of routine for myself since the lockdown, I eat dinner (breakfast) around two in the morning so I can wake up at lunchtime, a stupid idea I got from the internet to save money for breakfast (leave it to me to try every stupid idea I found on the internet). Most times I get up around a few minutes before or past twelve at noon and sometimes I wake up twelve on dot. I'd set an alarm, but I only do that when it's a matter of life and death, I guess I can say I still have a little trust in my body circadian alarm. I manage to get out of bed after a series of moans and turn-around on my bed (this can take up to fifteen minutes sometime), I head straight to the bathroom wibbly-wobbly, never fully awake, navigating more with my hand than my eyes. The first thing I try to do in the bathroom is to pour some water over my face to fully bring me back to life and then brush my teeth, then perform ablution with the below-room-temperature water rushing from the tap. After that I go to my little corner of the room where I have my prayer rug and bow to God to perform my namaz. This corner is my favorite part of the room apart from being the holiest place is my room, it also happened to be where my workstation and mini library is situated.  After that I laid down on my bed and went into a frenzy of bouncing from one social media to another until I feel hungry enough to start considering breakfast-n-lunch or as you'd call it, Brunch. This process of considering brunch may take about twenty-six-minutes of my day which is twice longer than the actual time it takes me to prepare the meal itself, which in most cases seems to end at the decision of eating bread with egg (chicken's egg).
Being someone that can catnap at will, having nowhere to go can be a luxury, I take an obsessive nap almost every day for about an hour or so (hey! don't judge me, I have nowhere to go, okay), if lions can sleep for about twenty hours in a day and still maintain the supreme power of the jungle, I guess I can sleep for about fifteen hours without having much to worry about. Basically, my days are directionless; I just do whatever I feel like, from playing video games to watching Netflix to snapchat to twitter to Instagram to playing Beach Buggy on my phone to checking out celebrities' page on Only fans.
(I'm spending this lockdown working) Like everybody else, I said to myself, 'I'm going to be productive throughout the lockdown, I'll finally get a chance to wrap up my book, or perhaps even come up with a new book.' But all of that was just wishful thinking.
Then it hit me one day, this new found freedom might actually be a blessing, and I wasn't really taking full advantage of it, I wasn't getting anything done. I feel a tad bit worthless and a little bad about myself. I wasn't proud of the way I was living—for idleness breeds bad habits. So, I decided to get myself engaged, to do something for myself, and then maybe a little for the world too. I rolled up my sleeves to readjust my life after mastering the art of doing nothing, brought out a blank ol' pad and decided to jot some ideas down, and I know what ever I decide I must commit. When I set a task for myself, I complete it. Therefore, I am careful not to start difficult and impractical tasks, because I love leisure. The first thing I decided on was that I was getting lots of distraction from everything going on around me and the world, if I want to do something worthwhile, I need to cut the distractions. And let's face it this is not how I wanted to spend my life, freshly out of college—bed ridden and useless.
Now I know I have problem; the problem now is... how to solve my problem, and as Jeff Daniels said "the first step in solving any problem is knowing there is one." I know cleaning up this kind of mess is going to take great dedication, commitment and courage. I need to start with the biggest and ugliest frog. By focusing on just changing one habit, a ripple effect will follow. Experts call this the "keystone habit." I got rid of all my gadgets for a month as an experiment, I said I'm going to live off these things' everyday maximum of an hour each day—this is the amount of time I have to read the news, to listen to music, call my mother, check Facebook and Twitter and everything else I do on my phone, everything is going to take an hour out of my day (sounds a little impossible, huh). And I tell you it wasn't easy; my mind craved these nuggets of information. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with new message, the brain starts anticipating the momentary distraction that opening a message provides; I'm missing out on all the trends on twitter, the glamorous live everybody has on Snapchat, missed out on Kylie's Livechat on IG, the constant reminder of my past from Facebook. At first, it felt like my mind couldn't survive without this extra new information, but as things went on, after going through the first week, which at some point seems impossible to pull through and almost made me give up, I did actually follow through. I noticed two things; one, my attention span grew, I could focus on things not effortlessly but with more ease, like if I drop my wallet somewhere, I actually know where it is before I get up to get it, things I see every day but never had time to notice and appreciate, appear novel-like to me. I don't know how much money I was wasting on internet data weekly until I decided to cut-down on my internet usage. Two, I actually have more time for my mind to wonder, which as a result led me to more ideas. I have more time to think about the past and present and which basically add up to better plans for the future. I could think straight on a particular thought for about an hour, it's an amazing thing—it's like my mind is this data box collecting information day in day out and has never had the opportunity to process any of the data or at least process them effectively, and with the time I have now, I can think about everything I've read, watched, listen to or things have done in the past without given much thought to, I could rethink my own thoughts themselves and perfect them.
Have you ever noticed how you came up with new ideas? Or more accurately when, and pay attention to what you're doing at that particular moment. If you ask people when did they come up with new ideas—you'll get answers like when taking a shower, driving a car, doing the dishes, ironing a cloth, knitting a cap, can you see the pattern here? Whenever we do some automated-routine (boring stuffs) we seem to clear our minds and attract new ideas. After doing this for about two weeks, I came to a sudden realization that one of the hardest things to do is, nothing. But I started to enjoy it after those two weeks and decided to take it to the next level and go get bored by myself, on purpose. Do you know the Good morning cereal contains seven vitamins and minerals? or that ceiling fan takes exactly ninety-two seconds to stop rolling after the electricity runs out? Or Glo customer care can take up to an hour before answering your call (that's if they end up answering your call). At some point I even tried Yoga, but never got the hang of it, and since YouTube and the internet was not there to guide me for the most part, I settled to the old and archaic method of Trial and error. The little idea I have of Yoga is from movies, American series and from the book Eat, Pray, Love. Since I don't have a Yoga mat, I use my prayer rug instead, I don't know what I was doing wrong but I always seem to get the Yoga pose wrong, you know the one where you fold the legs on each other. If I do that it just hurts my knees and I never cease to stop getting itches on my nose and everywhere else, so after two weeks of disappointing practice, I decided to quit.
All these might seem pointless and useless, but I tell you it was as a result of these four weeks' exercise that led to the foundation of this book, and some other wonderful ideas. So, I challenge you today to rediscover boredom too, to make your mind a little less stimulated, and simply notice what happens to your attention when you put the distractions away. Of course, I am not the first person to have such thoughts. The philosopher and boredom theorist Blaise Pascal promoted this type of exploration as early as the 1600s: 'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.' He wrote. So, a discomfort with being alone, holding one's tongue and simply being did not start with the advent of TV in the 1950s, with the coming of the internet in '90s or with smartphones: it has always been a problem, and Pascal was probably the first to write about this feeling. This constant impulse to turn to something else—TV, series, gadgets, games—grows out of a need with which we are born rather than being a cause. This disquiet that we feel has been with us since the beginning; it is our natural state. The present hurts, wrote Pascal. And our response is to look ceaselessly for fresh purposes that draw our attention outwards, away from ourselves. Such opportunities for interruption have increased dramatically over the last century, a trend that seems set to continue. We live in the age of noise. Silence is almost extinct.