Weight Watchers for the Soul

As I'm feeling better, I now am needing to start thinking about how to prioritize my time.  Since I really intend for this to be a time of deep contemplation about how I live my life, I think the prioritization of time and energy expense is a vital thing to grapple with.

So, here's what I'm noodling on today.

First, I need to rearrange the queue.  It's the oxygen mask dilemma: do I put the mask on myself first so I can better save the others around me, or do I save the others around me and die in the process? 

Obviously the former.  Which is already a challenge to me.  But, let's assume I can change my default impulse and keep myself in front of the queue rather than always being polite and letting others' needs cut in front of me.  I get to have a say and a priority here. 

Assuming that, how do I manage that prioritization myself?

My working model for today is that there are three categories of things in life that need to be balanced and nourished: body, mind, and soul.  If these three areas are well taken care of, I think that makes for a pretty healthy life.

Let me define some terms.

Health, to me, means balance and harmony, in whatever area. Eastern medicine strives to bring balance and harmony to the body, by balancing the qi.  Once balanced, the energy should flow evenly, bringing harmony to the being as a whole.  I think that overall health means making sure that body, mind, and soul all need to be nourished, thriving, and in balance with each other.

A nourishing activity is an activity that produces greater net well being.  The act of consuming a food, or performing an action, that results in more energy, greater balance and harmony, than there was before, is a healthy activity.

A negative nourishing activity, is an activity that results in less net well being.  Either the act of the activity is so draining that it ends up depleting rather than enhancing the resources, or the activity itself is simply not aimed or devoted to increasing health -- either way, it's a negative nourishing activity.

How to judge if something is a nourishing activity or not?  I think you can tell in two ways:  1) before the activity, do I have a sense of excitement or dread looking forward to doing it?  2) After the activity, do I have a sense of being enhanced or depleted?  I can be tired at the end of something but still enhanced (that sense of "good tired").  Or I can be drained and depleted, which is no bueno.

So, how does this work out?

For now, I'm dividing my life into the three categories of body, mind, and soul, and then putting activities into each category.  Like this:

Mind:

• Work that includes:
• Creative problem solving
• Use of my skill set
• Writing
• Editing

Body:

• Sleep
• Good eating
• Exercise
• Yoga
• Bicycling
• Walking

Soul

• Meditation
• Bird watching
• Socializing with good friends
• Cooking
• Gardening
• Reading
• Watching good content

Other:

• Meaningless stuff that just wastes my time
• Unavoidable - DMV, calls to insurance company, life admin stuff that just needs to be done, by me.
• Avoidable - Activities that sap my spirit and soul that don't necessarily need to be done but I do because it's easier than drawing a boundary; activities/people that used to nurture but now deplete; stuff that I could delegate but don't.

I would say my pre-diagnosis lifestyle was allocated something like this:

• Mind - 50%
• Body - 10%
• Soul - 10%
• Unavoidable Other - 10%
• Avoidable Other - 20%

I would say the optimum allocation would look something like this:

• Mind - 30%
• Body - 30%
• Soul - 30%
• Unavoidable Other - 10%
• Avoidable Other - 0%

What if I looked at each activity in a day and assigned it a plus or minus point value.  For example, right now I'm writing and thinking about all this stuff.  Is this a soul activity or a mind activity?  Well, it's a mind activity but it's high in nutritional value.  So maybe I could allocate this a Mind point value of, say, 5.

In a bit, when I'm done with this, I'm going to do some editing work on a book about Armenian musical history.  It pays me a bit of money, it uses my writing skills, but it's a slog.  It's not necessarily a negative nutritional slog, but it's not as highly nutritional as writing this has been.  So maybe I'll allocate it a Mind point value of, say, 2.

I just had a conversation with my mother.  Talking to her gives me some soul nutrition, but it's also an Unavoidable Other.  So maybe I would give that a Soul point value of 1, and an Unavoidable Other point value of 1.  If it had gone on very long, or become counterproductive, maybe those numbers would be in the negatives, or move into an Avoidable Other category.

Negative values can also be attributed -- if something is depleting or of negative nutritional value.  I could also argue that there could be occasions where there are mixed values, say, indulging in a beer after a long sweaty bike ride.  The beer would be low or negative on the body point scale, but high on the soul scale.
 
And, of course, I'm in a false modality right now, as I'm not working.  Working, for the most part, will  change my balance around.  I won't have the option to stop work after two hours to get some soul time in.  But it will fulfill most of my daily Mind requirements, and also inform me what I need to do off hours (work more?  NO!  Read more, walk more, visit the nursery, watch a good movie with the kids?  YES!)  Also, it may help to prioritize within work hours -- to maximize the high nutritional value of writing well, analyzing thoughtfully, using the brain that they're hiring me to use, rather than to engage in meaningless chit chat or waste time in the myriad other ways one can waste time in a corporate office environment.

It's like Weight Watchers for the soul!  Striving to get balance in the various categories.  The point is not to become a complete anal retentive jerk about this, but to actually make me conscious how my prioritization of tasks lead towards or detract from balance and harmony.

Maybe this is me with too much time on my hands.  But it seems to have some interesting possibilities for someone who is looking to overhaul a lifestyle at a molecular level.

More later.