One thing that I've noticed about blogging and reviewing teas online is that, when I write about tea often, I reach a point where I am constantly looking for ideas. I go through my day, and I see various things relating to tea, and think: "Oh, I can blog about that!" or "Oh, I really want to take a picture of that so that I can include it on my blog!" While this can lead to some interesting blog posts, it can also unfortunately take away from my experience of things in the moment; getting too sucked into this mentality can be a threat to mindfulness (or a different page on mindfulness for those of you more oriented towards pyschology than Buddhism).
Today there are no pictures, and I don't have anything to say about tea. I want to experience everything not only my tea, but everything in my daily life more mindfully.
Have you ever experienced this?
Have you ever struggled with the desire to write or blog about things taking away from your own mindfulness of them in the moment? If so, how do you balance your life and resolve this struggle?
This idea reminds me of going to concerts. I rarely take photos at concerts because I care so much about the experience and I don't want anything to distract from it. This isn't something I do as a rule, in fact I don't think I often fall into the mindset that you're describing. I often just have such a good time that taking pictures doesn't occur to me. But a lot of the concert-goers I know aren't like that, and when I log into facebook there are tons of photos from the concert that my friends took! So the moral is, it's good that some people are documenters of life so that the rest of us can just sit back and enjoy it. =) Haha
ReplyDeleteHaha...maybe I'm one of these people.
DeleteI certainly have gotten lazy though, when it comes to uploading photos. That's what I find to be more tedious and time-consuming.
I can somewhat feel for you! Sometimes when I have something in mind (about tea or about book/movie reviews for my Chinese writing), I would feel it bulges out so much and I have to stop doing anything else before writing out what I have in mind. But then, sometimes I feel I postponed more "useful" or important things and spent the time on writing. It might not be a good thing if it happens too much.
ReplyDeleteCurrently how to balance my life and allocate my time is a big issue. I don't know yet how I would handle everything, as I used to have much more free time to handle than what I will be having in the future year. One thing I've just started doing is making brief daily notes to track where I spend my time.
Reminds me of one of your posts that I read recently. (catching up on posts made during my vacation so I read your posts in a more or less random order)
ReplyDeleteIt was about reading a lot with as bottom line "less=more". Read less but more worthy text. Maybe this also goes for writing.
And yes I felt the danger. Either with connecting to tea as with photographing during an event. My experience is that if it intrudes to a certain degree connecting to tea and taking photos actually adds something to the event/vacation/etc. Like adding a new dimension. However if done to much or wrong this fragile balance is lost and all three become of lesser value. And it is easy to overdo it.