I once heard an interview on the good old CBC with this follow who had achieved a simply absurd amount of success in both science and the arts, so the interview had to ask him : what’s the secret of your success?

And he thought about it for a moment, then said “Do the next thing. Always do the next thing. Don’t give yourself time to lose your way. Just do the next thing. ”

And that has stuck with me over the years because it intuitively struck me as correct. That seemed like the right way to live to me. Stay busy. Keep your irons hot. Rest when you need to, but only for as long as you need to, and with the aim of getting back into the action ASAP.

High energy people either learn this or end up deeply miserable. Take top comedian Kevin Hart. He is infamous for exercising a LOT. Like, he’s the kind of dude who starts his day by running the equivalent of a marathon for fun.

And what do you know, he’s one of those small-bodied high energy dudes. ^[1] And he has talked in interviews about how he had a lot of mental health issues growing up – ADHD, OCD, anxiety, and so on – and he didn’t get over them until he joined the track team in high school and learned to use exercise to relax.

Now there’s a dude who does the next thing.

But that lesson is a lot easier to miss if you are a lumbering lummox like myself. That same life force is pushing a lot more body, and that makes us more reluctant to invest energy in active things because everything we do costs us so much more.

That kind of thinking is a trap, though. We have these energies within us and it is not a matter of using them or losing them.

It’s a matter of using them or, like a young Kevin Hart, having them drive you insane.

Hence the wisdom of doing the next thing. I have wasted my entire adult life – and I am 50 – hiding from life and treating all the things that might make me feel more alive as if they were a horrible invading force trying to kill me.

And I want to change that. And I am trying to do so.

But it’s not going to be easy or fun. I have thirty years of bad habits and self-destructive fears to overcome. My entire being is geared according to this “grovel in the dark and try not to exist” mindset, and so while I have started pushing in the other direction, it will take a long time before my heading actually changes.

No matter what, though, I will not stop trying.

And the farther I go, the more of my energies I reclaim, and the stronger my efforts become, and so my rate of progress grows.

Now I just have to live long enough to reach that distant tipping point when it will all start running in the other direction.

The happy direction.

More after the break.

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I’m a bad boy…

…because my dinner doesn’t have any vitamin B12 in it tonight.

I’ve been pretty good about getting some B12 bearing animal products into my dinner most nights. It’s easy when I order in, because being a product of North American culture I am incapable of conceiving a meal without a meaty entree.

Heck, sometimes, like when I have a big Mac attack, there’s also cheese involved. That makes TWO sources of vitamin b12.

But tonight, I just…. couldn’t. I could not make myself put together a bologna and cheese or bacon and cheese sandwich. Neither of those looked good to me and my legs were hurting so I abandoned my kitchen mission early and came back to get my frigging munching and blogging on.

I have food here in my room with me. There is always my current trail mix handy, and I usually have a jar full of something snacky for between meal munching.

For decades I just plain did not eat between meals. It was a holdover for my early days in the GVRD when I was on regular welfare and it was a struggle to get enough food just to cover regular meals.

Snacking was out of the question.

And once I internalized that, it was a very difficult habit to break. I automatically and compulsively live as if I am trying to survive the Apocalypse and have to make absolutely every resources last as long as I possibly can stretch it, and that hasn’t been the case for 20 years.

It’s a stark reminder of how hard it is to get myself to just freaking relax and enjoy life. Hypervigilance is pervasive with depression and it can express itself in many different ways depending on the depressive’s personality.

In me, it doesn’t come out as overtly suspicious or mistrustful behaviour because a) I trust my empathy and perceptions to tell me who I can trust and b) overtly paranoid behaviour only attracts attention whereas being blandly friendly lets you blend in with the background to better monitor those around you.

More realistically, overt paranoia simply is not compatible with my laid back low energy low stress personality.

Paranoia is way too much work, man.

But when I try to break my austerity mindset and figure out how to actually enjoy life, all kinds of crazy shit comes crawling out of the woodwork and I realize that I have my own private brand of being loco in the coconut.

The truly bracing experience of mental illness comes when you know the thoughts in your head are crazy and you can’t stop thinking them anyway.

I struggle with that all the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.