Woke up pretty early today, around 4:30 AM, and didn’t manage to go back to sleep. But all is good. I spent pretty much the whole time listening to Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythms of War, and it was awesome! It’s cool when an author can evoke a whole range of emotions and even move you to tears with just skill and imagination. It also helps that I was dedicating my full attention to the audiobook. Magic rarely happens when you're multitasking.

It’s now 06:32, and I’m doing something I haven’t done in quite a while: brewing myself a cup of coffee and watching as the light starts to pour in through the windows. The coffee isn’t ready yet, I think, and I feel the pressure to go back to our room in case the kids wake up, so my wife doesn’t have to deal with them alone. I’ll probably need to get into the habit of leaving the baby camera on before I come upstairs so I can know what’s going on.

... coffee is now ready. The sky is a beautiful gray outside, chilly and wet, full of promise...

As I sit here nursing my coffee, I’m wondering: is this going to be a journal entry or a blog post? What actually do I want to write about now that I have a blog again? Funny how we think we need to write about anything specific, force ourselves to produce—always producing. I guess yes, this will be a post, but I don’t know what it’s going to be about, maybe nothing specific. Maybe just me and my morning ruminations. After all, can there be anything more intimate than the internal thoughts of a wandering mind? Not trying to make anything, just convey—in probably more words than necessary—the internal landscape of the soul. The effervescence of the quiet morning, the cup of coffee.

So here we are. No need to do anything. Chill for a while, enjoy it. Collecting energy for the day to come, especially once the little ones wake up. They know not the meaning of the word pause. For them, I feel it's all a mix—a blend of play and relax and laugh and sing—with no pause. And that, in itself, is beautiful, wonderful. I cherish my moments with them, most of the time. Other times, I escape them, trying to burrow into my phone. I try not to, knowing these escapes are exactly the thing I want to avoid most. And I’m happy to say it's getting better. But you know, things go up and then go down—the eternal dance. Being entirely surrendered to the present can be hard. Being entirely surrendered to anything, dedicated wholeheartedly to a single thing, is hard.

I often think about how, in olden times, people had no easy access to distractions. Now, most of the world’s population carries an instant gratification device in their pockets. At any time, they can flip open their phone and look at interesting photos or funny videos. Like parrots looking at ourselves in the mirror, we are. The thing isn’t wrong in and of itself, but think about what it does to our mind habits. We’ve built this compulsive habit of avoiding boredom at any cost, as we're told by our culture that it's one of the greatest evils. And perhaps it was so also in the olden times. But then, you had to work to get entertainment, while now it’s as cheap as it can get.

I imagine writers from previous generations. Most of them likely wrote because they found it to be great fun. Would we, for instance, have had a Tolkien in our modern world? Or a Keats? A Jane Austen? Or the Greek myths? Who knows, maybe yes, but I tend to think they would be drastically different, and not necessarily for the better.

I guess I’m just making excuses now, and falling into this act of victimizing myself (and the whole of humanity). But as they say, "criticizing is easy, fixing is hard".

...

Ahh, it has started to rain now. I guess today will be a stay-at-home day. At least for most of it. Yesterday morning, the sky was the same, and then it cleared up around noon. We’ll see.

Have a good day ☕️