Plan for the Week: It’s been a while since I’ve gone a full week with a comprehensively healthy routine. This means full nights of sleep, nutritious meals that are primarily home-cooked, staying on top of day-to-day cleaning and administration, and substantial physical exercise. This is what I’m aiming for next week.
By the time I start school again in the fall, I want to be as habituated as possible to healthy living, so renewing my efforts now are an attempt to start cultivating those habits.
One aspect of healthy living that I want to improve is my community service. I wrote about this before, but I never committed to a program. This week I want to try again. Other than laziness, my biggest barrier in accomplishing that goal is that I get stuck trying to find the activity that’s maximally productive in terms of its contribution to society. That probably sounds silly, and it is silly after a certain point. Of course I don’t want to waste time, but it’s more important that I get out and do something for a few hours each week, even if it doesn’t match my ideal concept of maximum service contribution. And indeed, community service is in large part about the sense of good that one experiences simply from helping in some way, regardless of the specific contribution.
One more comment about “healthy living”. I’ve been thinking about the busy nature of modern life and the multitude of information that surrounds us. It seems to me that there is only so much a person is capable of, in terms of input/output. For example, sometimes I see people in cafes or university lounges with books beside them, a laptop in front of them (on which they are browsing the internet and using IM), a TV broadcasting somewhere in the background, people moving and chatting around them, and sometimes they are listening to music on top of all that. Such a person cannot possibly be engaged in any one of his tasks in a serious way. This seems to be common in our society. There are effectively infinite sources of stimulation and information, but do we give them the attention to digest them properly? Contemplation is a verb that seems lacking in our contemporary vocabulary.
Because of the mismatch between the quantity of information accessible to us and our capabilities, I think it’s important that we limit ourselves. For example, I feel anxious whenever I walk into a bookstore and look at the newly released titles. My desire is to read and master all of them. This desire is fed by the respect that we have for quantity, as in “I read 4 books this month as opposed to 3 books last month, so this was a better month.” Or, more to the point, if you gave the average person the option between reading 10,000 good books at an average-to-poor level of comprehension in his lifetime, or reading 5 great books at incredible depth, wouldn’t most people choose the former? Even if they say they would choose the latter, don’t most of us choose the former with our actions?
I’m not arguing for any specific reading quotas or restrictions, but I want to increase my awareness of my limits and the requirements for time spent meaningfully. This means a general trend toward doing less at a higher level of quality. I guess “inspectional reading” is meant to allow the reader to browse the sea of information to filter out things worth reading at a greater level of depth, so one solution is to continue practicing that skill. Regardless, I want to be aware of this issue.

Plan for Tomorrow: Tomorrow I’m going to let myself get up naturally, meaning without an alarm clock. I’ve deprived myself of sleep for the last three nights, and I need a night to catch up. After waking up and getting ready for the day, I want to work on Kaplan, exercise, make a plan for meals this week, go grocery shopping, and spend one hour looking at health insurance plans.