I had lunch with a friend today and he asked what am I doing to keep busy on the side.  I have a family and a  lot of interests and I have always had side projects.  This summer has taken it out of me, emotionally and I lack the energy for side projects.  I say I am working on myself, or working on becoming conscious.  I no longer want to work on projects that are fun diversion but lack meaning for me and I am not sure what exactly it means to work on something meaningful.

To this question, I responded that I am trying to figure out what it is I want to work on in my free cycles. For the past few days every morning I write a list of 10 goals. The goals change from day to day, but at the end of the week I am going to go back and look at them. I am lucky to have the luxury to have this issue, since most people struggle just to have enough to eat.  I am in a privileged position to live as conscious a life as possible. At every moment I can make a decision on how I want to live my life.  So I am grateful for that, but also feel pressure to rise to the challenge of this.

So what guides my decision about how to live my life? What brings me pleasure.  Even this is not as easy as it seems. I feel like I have programmed myself to like certain things like le corbusier (sorry Lian I dont).  So I am engaged in a deprogramming of myself so that I can

go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience

Thank you James Joyce. How does one deprogram oneself. I dont want this to be an empirical exercise where I try a bunch of things and slowly realize all the things I do not like. There is a theory in natural medicine that people learned which plants healed what disease by listening to the plants, through a somatic processes and perhaps an extrasensory process. They did not go through an empirical analysis to test out all the plants and all the possible things a plant could cure.

So what is the extrasensory way to determine one’s pleasure. Perhaps it is listening to my unconscious. Perhaps it is paying attention to the synchronicities. What are the ones showing up? Music, Nature, Body Work, Conversation, Painting,  Poetry (reading), Film (watching), Art (writing) — and programming …