#131 – January 18, 2022 (18/365)

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Hello!

Entry number 18 in the 365 Black & White Challenge is a photograph from above of a Lego build in progress.

I seem to have lost the ability to concentrate on doing one thing at a time. It actually caused me anxiety if I’m focussing completely on one thing at a time.

When I play the drums, I’m more likely to make a minor slip if I’m actually thinking about what I’m playing at the time. I’ve been known to complete Sudoku puzzles while playing “America” from West Side Story, a piece whose pulse changes every bar. One of my regular readers was in the orchestra at the time this was happening and likes to bring it up.

With this in mind, I have trouble reading. I have no trouble actually reading the words and comprehending their meaning, I have trouble sitting down and reading. My mind wanders and I end up reading the same sentence multiple times until I give up in frustration. This is a big problem for me for when I was a child, I would have a different book on the go for each different day of the week and would read for hours in bed at night.

This is why I love audiobooks. Audiobooks are awesome. There, I said it.

Audiobooks allow me to imbibe books whilst I am doing something else, most commonly driving. My work commute (4 days per week as I work from home on Wednesdays) is one hour in and 45 mins back. I’ve taught myself to listen at greater than real-time to allow me to get through more in the time available. By taught, I mean that it takes getting used to hearing a book read at a faster speed. Each book is different and it comes down to the narrator’s performance. The book I’m currently listening to has to be played at 1x speed as the authour naturally reads quickly, but my previous book (Game of Thrones Book 2) was listened to at 1.3x speed very comfortably.

I truly wish I had the ability to sit down and read a book. It’s something I’m working on.

You know when I’m truly in need of a rest when I can sit down and watch my YouTube subscriptions without doing anything else. That, for me, is true downtime. It often frustrates my wife as she has a hard time sitting down and doing nothing which is only partly due to her to-do list being the size of an A4 sheet filled with font size 8 items. To be completely honest, I’m not actually sure what she does to relax as I don’t think I’ve ever seen her relaxed in all the many years I’ve known and loved her.

At work, getting back to this whole I can’t focus on one thing debacle, I have podcasts going in one ear. The only time I am podcast free is when I’m researching or writing (as in creative/marketing writing) something and I don’t think I need to tell you how painful that exercise is. I listen to podcasts at work because the office is the quietest workspace I’ve ever worked in and it freaks me out.

I also never have anything playing when writing these blog posts. 

Damn, I’m weird.

Have a great day and I’ll see you in the next post.

Richard

 

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