Howto : Do Nothing.
Jan 31
The greatest challenge in a life so close to the edge of real and cyberspace must certainly be : How to relax. How to wind down from all the waves of information constantly washing up on our shores. How to stand back from the chatting crowd on Instant Messaging, from the many emails that need answering, from the hundreds of feeds and bookmarks.
Being plugged into the information age has not made life simpler for us. There is so much more to see, so much more to do, so much more to learn and so many people to talk to. And with contacts all over the globe, the clock never stops.
And with the whole "content on demand" thing it even gets worse. Where one could throw a brick at the tv when there was nothing on, get up and go to bed, we now no longer have that excuse. Several very interesting Videopodcasts lure at me from my Itunes playlist still nagging at my brain that I have not watched them yett.
My Ipod is filled up with a slew of weekly podcasts that need to be heard and on my usb stick several wonderful Ebooks are screaming to be printed and read.
It should have made it all easier. " Watch movies without ever leaving the comfort of your home " now means that we do not have an excuse to go out and do something totally different cause the "video rental store" was closed. A bitorrent client is another sure thing to build up a lot of content you have acquired but never installed / looked at / listened to. And your feedreader is actually only a device that tells you how many Items you have not read yet. Even your email client tells you how slack you have been in your social life when it comes to unread emails or the ones you have flagged as "need to answer this one".
So with all this and more I find it extremely hard to mellow down and relax. I willingly have to force myself to disconnect from any form of communication. Turn Cellphone, computer and IP-TV stuff off and walk upstairs to a segment of the house I purposely held devoid of computers. I take along a cup of tea (MAYBE just my ipod for soothing music) and a good book with a very slow story. I think you could even call this 'meditation for Geeks" but that is how methodical that I have to be if i want to get my "Relaxing" done. Having to plan it, organise it, schedule and outline its boundries is the only way that it can get done. So "doing nothing" is just another thing I have to do.
