Take a walk
Last Saturday, I was going to take my dog out for a short night walk before we all went to bed. It was the last task of the day and everyone else had already gone to bed. Me and my dog were the only ones awake. We started walking towards the forest and everything was illuminated by a full moon, and the temperature was around zero degrees – very comfortable. Once my eyes got used to the moonlight, I didn’t really need my headlamp to see so I turned it off. We kept walking and after a short while we had entered a forest road with no houses or civilization in sight. The short walk ended up being the longest walk I’ve had in a long time. We just kept walking and I loved every minute of it.
The importance of being alone with your thoughts every now and then cannot be overstated. A crucial factor to note, is that you should have full focus on the walking. Don’t listen to podcasts, audiobooks, or music. Preferably, you should leave your phone at home. It makes a ton of difference, and your mind will go into completely different place when you set it free to wander around. I know I have sinned in this regard on multiple occasions, even though I know it is better to just stay off the tech for a little while. A good analogy is listening to music. We listen to music all of the time. At least I do. But what do we mean by listening? The listening often occurs while driving the car, cleaning, cooking or whatever. That means you are engaging in it as a secondary activity and thus, you cannot give it full focus. It is a rather rare occasion that I really listen to music. When I sit down for a while without the risk of interruptions and turn on a piece that I love. And not engaging in anything else but the listening. There is no comparison. And I am pretty sure that this analogy can be applied to many other fields, like having a conversation. If you are having a life-changing conversation with a close friend, you are probably better off by engaging 100% and not doing it while cleaning.
I have been working so hard for the past year that no other period in my life comes close. Hard work is fine if you love what you do, but recently I have realized that I have likely gone a bit too far. Just like a car engine, the redline on the rev counter is there for a reason. It’s not a problem to enter the redline every now and then, especially not on a twisty mountain road in an alpine pass with corners drawn by God himself. But let’s consider that you downshift to abruptly without rev matching: You might spin up the engine beyond the redline if you do that, and that can indeed shoot the whole engine to pieces. If that happens, get back to the safe zone as fast as possible and take a chill pill. And I think that’s what has happened to my mind. I work super hard with a job that I love, but I haven’t slowed down at all. It’s been constant activity in the brain from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I close them at night. Well, the only time that I’ve really allowed myself to relax properly has been when reading bedtime stories to my son. But all the other time, there’s always been something going on.
I know a very simple fix to this problem, and it was all too obvious during recent my moonlight walk: Leave the phone at home on the next dog walk. Give your mind a chance to catch its breath occasionally. When the buzz goes silent, it is a great opportunity to have a little debate with yourself. And if you really want to take it to the next level, you should write down your thoughts too after your walk. When I articulate my thoughts into written words, they become well-defined and not abstract. It is actually possible to have two incommensurate standpoints on a given topic in an abstract thought, just because the conflict isn’t visible to you. But once you write it down that is just not possible anymore. You must choose your position. And that will drive you forward whether you like it or not. It’s a great way to “smoke out the problems”.