An Experiment in Scotch

So some of you will remem­ber that I made some Lenten com­mit­ments and here’s the point where I update you since I know you’ve been anx­iously await­ing all my amaz­ing self-discovery. Right. Any­way, I do feel like jot­ting down a lit­tle bit about the expe­ri­ence. We’ll start with the suc­cess first. For 40 days and 40 nights, I didn’t surf the web. It was damn hard. I never really go used to not read­ing ESPN or DallasNews.com or what­ever. But I did it. I wasn’t com­pletely off the wire since I can hardly do my job with­out talk­ing to God daily but I wasted no time on mind­less surfing.

What did I learn from that? That I really don’t need all that infor­ma­tion. Mon­day night, I went on dallasnews.com and there were two sto­ries about mur­der, one about a crooked politi­cian and just a bunch of junk. It dawned on me at that moment that I really don’t need that stuff. I don’t remem­ber any of it, it’s com­pletely wasted time and it absolutely saps my focus, atten­tion and energy. So I’m mostly stick­ing with it. I went through News­ga­tor tonight (after we set up a large chunk of this weekend’s garage sale-come buy stuff!!) and while there is def­i­nitely some qual­ity there, there’s also a bunch of stuff I just don’t need to bother with. Scott Berkun was right, you just don’t need all that stuff and it’s mak­ing your life qual­ity much, much lower. The things that are impor­tant are things that require com­plete and total undi­vided atten­tion. Every­thing else is fluff and wasted time. I think K and I had more din­ners together dur­ing those 40 days than the 80 days before that. We took up ten­nis (well “took up” is a tad strong but we’ve been twice in 3 weeks so that should cer­tainly be con­sid­ered a habit, given the par­tic­i­pants) and I think we talked more about impor­tant things (though still not nearly as much as she would like, I am a guy after all).

So that’s the suc­cess. The fail­ure is my med­i­ta­tion habit. I did it for about 10 days and then com­pletely dropped it. I’m sad about that, I was start­ing to get some­where with it and then it just went away. I’m try­ing to do shorter med­i­ta­tions more often but I miss the 20 min­utes. I’m still try­ing to do it but it’s cer­tainly not a daily habit.

Over­all, I’m happy with how Lent worked out this year. I’m writ­ing more, think­ing more clearly which may or may not be reflected in my writ­ing and I have more time for the impor­tant things. God must be happy with me.