taking control of your free time
When I was a kid, I imagined adulthood as something extremely liberating. Maybe due to the specific environment I grew up in, I longed for more control over basically everything. Sometimes that need resulted in forming a strong, healthy habit, like my commitment to amateur sports and self-study, and other times it led to borderline obsessive behavior, turning me into a control freak. The latter part is, thankfully, long behind me.
But some habits never truly die. Not so long ago, I planned a trip to Venice. Some time passed between the planning and the execution, and it wasn’t an easy period. More work at my job, a stressful time at the university, and even more work at my second job. Add a massive heatwave to the equation, making my sleep the worst I’d had in ages, and the result wasn’t surprising: total exhaustion. So the day before my flight, I looked in the mirror and asked myself: am I really going to enjoy this?
At the time, the things that came to mind were almost exclusively mundane or mildly irritating. Waiting in the queue for the security check at the airport. Infants screaming during the flight. The heat. The smell. The absolute crowding of one of the most touristy spots on the planet. Even if none of these were to happen, I was actively anticipating those events, and so I was going through them inside my own head. I wasn’t thinking about breathtaking architecture or amazing cuisine, or even Italian ice cream. My excitement level was zero. And yet, there was a voice inside, trying to coerce me into traveling nonetheless, only because it was something that I had planned in advance.
Because, you see, the all-encompassing, ever-present culture of discipline has imprinted heavily on me. I started this post with a thought about freedom, and here it all comes together: I’ve been shackled by my own perception of self, even if not fully realized. Even the way I spend my free time has been polluted by the ideas of staying productive and fulfilling my obligations, even if those were only to me from the past. Sure, there are times where those commitments, once undertaken, are beneficial in the long run, but that wasn’t really the case.
Waking up on the day of departure and not leaving the bed before noon was a truly transformative experience. Relearning how to take control of your free time and make it truly free, not bound by your own ideas of how your perfect self should spend it, is a difficult task for many of us. But the ability to, let’s say, follow your gut and just do what you truly want to do is worth a thousand times more than any missed flight.