YOUNG MAN!

On cutting caffeine and getting addicted to swimming.

I keep thinking that it’s Tuesday and it is not. Time has felt completely liquid lately. I can feel its passing, but only in the way that you can occasionally feel drops of water on your skin after they’ve dried.

This has only intensified because I cut caffeine out of my life semi-permanently (meaning as permanently as I can imagine) just over a week ago. I’ve had a hell of a time doing it. I woke up 24 hours after the cut and I had one of the worst headaches I’ve ever experienced. I spent the next two hours crying uncontrollably, cycling through a panic attack, and mostly feeling like the ceiling was collapsing in on me. 

And then I just gave in and went back to sleep for several hours.

When I woke up I talked through it with a dear friend, figured out a solution to get through the week, and now I’m on the other side of it I think?

Part of that solution was a lot of walking, and a lot of making space for my own thoughts. This week the thing I’m clinging to for a boost of much needed dopamine is going to my local YMCA pool which I think is my favorite place? 

Sure, there are a bunch of screaming children in one section of the pool, but for the most part there’s always an open lounger in the sun but near enough to an umbrella that I can shade when I start to sizzle. I swim for about an hour in the deep end, away from children, and then I read in the sun for about an hour. It feels indulgent. It feels necessary. It’s getting me through.

I quit with the caffeine because it was having some adverse reactions to my undiagnosed but definitely existent ADHD. I’d drink coffee, be pretty alert for about half of an hour, and then feel like taking a nap. After months and months of drinking two coffees on Saturdays and then falling asleep in the car ride home, I realized that the two things were probably related.

And so I started out on my hero's journey through the denial of needing to do something but not wanting to. I desperately, desperately didn’t want to lose it. I started every morning with a cup of coffee and a book on the couch. It was a slice of time that felt like it was just my own.

The aforementioned tears and spiraling started the first time I sat down to read and couldn’t because of the headache and intense fatigue. Then I couldn’t get bailed out of my misery prison with the usual. 

As it turned out I needed to replace both the beverage and the ritual, and while I was at it I needed to look at how I viewed time as a whole.

That made it the perfect time for a re-read of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

Here are some snips from the book that I found a lot of value in, and maybe you will too.

The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

I’ve been saying “a plan is just a thought” to myself as a sort of mantra through this. Same as the below.

Attention, on the other hand, is just life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

And finally:

The good procrastinator accepts the fact that she can’t get everything done, then decides as wisely as possible what tasks to focus on and what to neglect. By contrast, the bad procrastinator finds himself paralyzed precisely because he can’t bear the thought of confronting his limitations.

That’s all for today.

Here’s to hoping we all become the good kind of  procrastinators while prioritizing taking care of ourselves as best we can.

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