I remember Dad taking us to the archery range when we
were kids. During one of these excursions, several of us were sitting in the
field watching gophers pop in and out of their tunnels while Julie practiced.
Dad was recounting his experience after moving to California
But not quite as distinct as this.
I’m glad to say that my life is not that bad by any
stretch. But I often struggle with not being able to quit thinking. For
instance, I’m at Starbucks right now, reading Atlas Shrugged. I love this book,
and in any case I need to read it for a scholarship essay. I also have the next
four days off, and I’m not even in the middle of a quarter.
That being said, I still have this perpetual nagging
feeling in the back of my mind, this mad itch to achieve something. I skip fleetingly between various ideas; part of
me wants to learn everything I can about tax law – to start the project of
creating a comprehensive map of the entire tax system in the U.S. Part of me
wants to design some kind of circuit – any kind of circuit, as long as it has
some function. Part of me wants to study MySQL. Part of me wants to work for
Charter. I keep having these brief thoughts interrupting my reading, and as a
consequence I end up re-reading sentences or paragraphs when I realize the for
the past several seconds or minutes, I’ve been reading one thing while dwelling
on another.
I know the difference too, between how I read now and
how I read when I’m fully focused, because when I’m completely focused on a
book I burn straight through it. This is why I started a journal, in fact. I
have a written and electronic journal. Writing clears my mind, as if I’m
literally emptying my thoughts onto paper (or in this case, into the internet).
There’s a dude wearing headphones sitting about three
feet in front of me. He keeps rubbing his temples with his eyes closed and an
intense look of…some kind of passion, it seems. He looks pretty damn focused
on whatever he’s listening to.
