remedy for routine

I read somewhere that your exhaustion isn’t from being tired, but from not doing enough things that spark the life in your soul. The honesty of this statement is painful - pouring all of yourself into something for a sake of achieving goals rather than for the passion of the journey can deplete everything from a being. It is that precious word balance that I so often lack, running open at full speed and exhausting any resource available to achieve the ends I’m running at. This is fine for short bursts, but it’s these marathons that leave me a shell of a human, sitting and staring into space for an hour lacking any further willpower to move, achieve or complete a task. And it is misleading to state it is strictly the duration, it’s the intensity in which I run within these periods, and why do I lack the ability to manage my own participation, what broken lever exists in my psyche refusing to allow a partially engaged day - only all or nothing? All advances are good, are where they should be, everything is exactly where I’ve laid it out to be at this point in time in my strategies, I should be content with that but I fear I immediately just set the bar slightly higher on myself, therefore making sure nothing will ever be good enough and I will always exist in this realm of discontent. So, part of being maturely conscious is recognizing such mental traps and working yourself out of them, and therefore I am drawn to that first statement, which may be a bastardization of the original statement as I’ve only seen it replicated in memes, which is by far the best form of communication but hardly a trustworthy source for authenticity. So the best source of activating joy when I am too tired to physically exert myself and it’s too rainy and cold to do so even were my body willing to participate, is writing. So here I am. I go on the road again next week, and thank God for that, though it’s been hardly over a month since I’ve traveled, it feels much longer, the routine of the day to day and the schedule of knowing exactly where I’m going to be at exactly what time at exactly what day is crushing my soul. I cannot stand routine, I have never been able to withstand routine. What a waste of a new day to burden it with a schedule made in the past. It’s not at all relevant to the present time - a picnic planned in a rainstorm, a meeting planned on the nicest spring day of the year - there is no opportunity to react to the world around you, only to follow self programmed commands like the machine you have trained yourself to be. Don’t take this writing for discontent overall, considering the alternatives available to me, my life is about the best I could have hoped for given my circumstances. I do love my career, my world, my life, but again it’s that nagging in the back of my mind, that voice that there is so much out there outside of this little world I live in, so many alternate realities I am shielded from when I willfully refuse to engage in the millions of other worlds that exist outside of the bubble I insulate myself in. So next week I again am traveling to somewhere I’ve never really explored (as well as some more familiar vistas), and am starving for the new visuals, the new people, the new stimuli. I look forward to being exhausted because I have spent my energy in exploration rather than just beaten myself mentally with the same conversation and sales pitch over and over ad nauseam. I find myself having conversations - successfully! - and closing deals - successfully! - and not remembering a fucking thing I said as I’ve said the same thing so many times it’s as voluntary as breathing, blinking. I have automated my processes so successfully it requires little of my active participation besides watching myself work in my minds eye and tweaking things as needed to further automate the processes. It increases my output, yet it defecates on my curiosity. Defecates all over it. So therefore I travel, I breathe and live again, I become so much more myself when I am away. The joy of being oneself, truly oneself. I admit that I am more myself than most people of my age. I am myself enough that I have unintentionally pushed away status quo peers that don’t know what to make of my oddities and straight defiance to everything I should be. I am not ashamed to admit my goals are not selfless, though the older I get the more I’m convinced that it’s the people who claim to be the most selfless of all are more often than not the worst combination of selfish and lazy. I’m certainly not reckless or vicious, I would never use anyone strictly for the goal of achieving my ends. But I can hardly say that I would sacrifice myself for the desires of others, which is the giant proverbial stick in the mud with so much of my psychology. Without stating specifics, it is without saying that most women of my age are expected to be everything except champions of their own desires. I do believe that is finally changing, but is still the underlying current. I am not one out there to scream of the imbalance between the sexes, as opportunities are the same, it is the stigma people allow themselves to be pulled by. I would find it difficult to find judgement of a man who ardently pursues his goals of career success, financial independence, exploration and personal happiness, but I could, quite literally, write a book with the admonishments I’ve received, particularly as I get older, of my life pursuits and goals. The irony of the matter being that nothing I do affects anyone but myself, so there seems to be no basis to the judgement other than deflection of my detractor’s own fears and comfort in conformity. But there are no gains without sacrifice, and my sacrifice exists in my time and energy. Some days it’s a minimal deposit, other days it depletes me entirely, and I sit at my laptop writing aimlessly without resolution, just wishing to convey some sort of honest and true thought before another day slips by.