30 Days Journal - Day 28

I am a terrible journal-er. As an exercise to become better, I decided to do a 30 day journal challenge for myself. Just like during my quarantine, I am using Isolation Journals for daily journal prompt.

Prompt: Set your timer for five minutes and do nothing. Stare at the desk or the wall or the dust motes in a slice of sunlight. Then write about the thoughts, the questions, and the answers that came up in that moment of slowness, of stillness.

Do nothing sounds like my daily routine sometimes. One of the things I wanted to continuously work on is meditating but since I am still a rookie at it and my thoughts continuously flood my peaceful mindset. Did I do XYZ? When should I do XYZ? And most of the time I go down a steep hill of panic begin to get anxious. Eventually I loose all concentration for this meditation and become deeply anxious as I am not getting what I need to get done done. What I find really useful is to actually write to-dos down so it almost gets removed from my mental checklist and reduces my anxiety significantly.

I also realize over the years, as I begin practicing yoga, I learned more about focusing. It is one of the first times that I truly understand what focus feels like. I like being distracted and having background noise in my life since sometimes the quietness brings me odd feelings. Learning to focus and to not be wavered by random thoughts is truly a daunting mental exercise. It sometimes can be scary for me when I sit in the quiet room and doing nothing. Not because of all the crime podcasts and TV series I indulge on, on a regular basis. Sometimes the idea of future plague my mind. I am surprisingly not an optimist but I do escape from time to time into a day dream world where everything is working out as I planned.