There gets to a certain point at the end of everyday when the space between my eyes beneath the bridge of my nose starts to feel like a vacuum, sucking a good deal of my conscious awareness into it. My heart feels a faint jolt, and I have to remind myself to steady my breathing and calm down. This happens reliably at least once during the course of every night, and sometimes more. For those of you unfamiliar with such a sensation, it is the feeling of being incredibly overwhelmed due to all of your personal obligations whirling around your head at hyper-drive-ultra-speed. Now, I know that to the untrained eye, this would seem like a bad thing. Truth of the matter is that it's not particularly pleasant, but I have learned to welcome it because it's a sure fire sign that I am doing something right.
The fact of the matter is that there is not much worse for the human mind, body, and soul than boredom. Having nothing to do is depressing as all get-out. It zaps any motivation to do anything left in you, as I eats you from the inside out. But the opposite can be said for stress due to busyness. I mean, sure it IS totally awesome to have the occasional fuck-around time, when you can just kick back and be terribly unproductive, but this really only works in moderation. That's why you see folks who continue to work even after retirement living longer and more fulfilling lives.
I personally have found that I am always happier when I am barely able to tread water in the vast sea of life, rather than when I have nothing to do but float lazily by. The strange thing is that I have never been so motivated to be so free of all that used to hold me down in place as I have in Tokyo. Leaving behind my whole life for the umpteenth time just to start anew must have shocked my system in a stranger way than I had orginally thought. All of a sudden I find myself having in depth thoughts about the nature of my own tiny existence, as well as the social world that surrounds me. Perhaps burning my poor, stagnant, all-too-comfortable excuse for a life to the ground was exactly what I needed to start actually living. But living in this exciting new world of mine isn't as easy as it sounds. Just like any worthwhile thing, it requires care, thoughtfulness, devotion, and maintenance. For me, this means setting various goals having to do with all of the little lives that dwell inside me, forming an ecosystem all their own to make up my overall reality. These separate entities include, but are not limited to my athletic, romantic, artistic, social, and (for the first real time in two and a half years) my scholastic lives. It seems that although some work better together than others, each one competes in some way with the rest as to which is most vital to my overall well being.
Funny thing is, just like any ecosystem, a shaky balance must be respected in order for all of the life forms within it to survive and grow. I try to distribute my attention equally to all involved, doing my best to make sure not one aspect is overlooked. Now this would be an incredible amount of work anywhere, but in tokyo it is especially difficult. In a city that moves as fast as the self-seeking mind does, it is very easy to “miss a step and fall into the rapid river called fate” as Tite Kubo says. Basically, to stagnate and chode-ify. To be tempted by this boisterous technicolor beauty to just submit and spend the night at the local izakaya is sometimes too much to bear.
Luckily for me there is an unrest that I am quite familiar with which prevents me from giving into her. It starts as a knot in my chest and then works its way up my spinal cord until it reaches that space in the middle of my face that I mentioned before. Call it obsessive compulsive, or just plain restlessness, but for the life of me, I can't stop doing. My journals are filling up by the volume, my sketchbooks are falling apart at the seams (literally, I swear!) and my phone is blowing up with people trying to see what I'm gettin' into. For the first time in my life, I have found a purely positive form of busy.
The bottom line is that I have no free time anymore. I have so much life to live in what seems to be just a short amount of time to do so. Take from that what you will. And sure, would it be nice to be able to kick back every once in a while and watch a Kurosawa flick on my computer with no pangs of guilt creeping through every part of my body? No doubt, but fuck it, I'll sleep when i'm dead.
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