Artist Night 4a - Emptiness

Artist night 4 was was of the most exciting ones yet. I did absolutely nothing! No, not really, but the goal was to do nothing. This was fairly difficult for me since I normally try to keep myself busy. Here's how nothing went down.

First, I always have a lot of junk floating around in my head. I'm sure everyone does. I learned about mind dumps when I read through "Getting Things Done" a few years ago. I try to do a mind dump every once in a while and I've been surprised at how well they work for clearing all that junk out. Basically, all you do is write all the stuff you have floating around in your head down on paper. As soon as it's on paper, it's out of your mind and you are free to think about other things. My mind dump only took about half an hour.

Next, I put in my noise canceling headphones in. I bought them a while ago to use when I travel on airplanes. They're great for that, but they're also great for just blocking out all the extra noise in my house. So I put those in and then turned on some meditation music. After about five minutes, I found I couldn't handle the meditation music, so I turned that off and just sat in silence.

Then I did absolutely nothing. I just tried to sit there with a clear mind. It was very relaxing, at least at first. For the first half hour or so, my mind was clear and everything was happy. Then ideas started coming back into my head and I decided to explore them rather than force them back into nothingness.

What I found was very interesting. I have some very big anger issues lurking around. I'm not really an angry person at all, these just might be things that I have bottled up and left to rot. I think it would be interesting to try and address these things. I'm still deciding on the best course of action. I believe that anger is helpful. At least, it helps me to know that something isn't right. I don't think it's right release your anger on someone else, but I think it is helpful if it drives you to do something to correct a problem. In the next little while, I'll see if I can come up with a good plan for addressing the issues I've discovered.

Overall, I think it was a spectacular night. I don't often encounter the dark side of Mike (unless it's been a few hours since I've eaten, then I get impatient and grumpy, but I think that's understandable). I wonder if the angry Mike can be creative too, there's an interesting thought. I'll explore that later.