Sitting in my office during an hour when a patient has not bothered to attend their scheduled appointment has always been a bit of a paradox for me. On the one hand having a break from patients and the marks they make in my psyche is a blessed relief on the other hand I now have an hour (sometimes more) I have no idea what to do with.

I occasionally use this time to walk around the downtown streets of my town if the weather is nice. Exercise, as the doctor will tell you, is important. I have taken to filling my office with books I am reading, journals to document my many deep thoughts (I could be a deep thinker), and of course my laptop so that I may take advantage of the time to address my more formal writing assignments. This blog to sone extent falls under that last category.

What do I most often find myself doing with the spare time? Listening to music and staring out the window is up there but a lot of the time I find myself staring like a zombie at my phone as my fingers motion a never ending procession of meaningless videos which fill my Instagram account.

As my father would undoubtedly put it, I waste the time doing essentially nothing.

That habit has to end but ending habits is no easy task, even if the habit is wasteful or worse, harmful. I’m sure the three people who will read this could agree with that sentence. Seriously how many of us have habits, that is patterns of behavior we recognize as unnecessary or harmful to our overall goals (even if that goal is simply to live in peace) which we still find it near impossible to do away with?

Sure I could delete my Instagram account, as I did with instagram’s daddy Facebook, and that would potentially free up some time from distraction but I don’t. I did open my account for specific reasons and while I use the account for those purposes Instagram and social media in general are designed to grab and hold on to your attention. and certainly some brainless scrolling ever now and again isn’t really all that bad.

So where does that leave me/us?

Well if my journaling on this subject prior to picking up my digital quill to share this thought here has any validity to it, the answer is scheduling and planking. Scheduling my time to write and planning my writing out. That sounds familiar, think about what it is you want to do and set aside time to do it. Begin with the ending in mind, to put it another way.

Sounds great, so why is that a problem with this blog?

Simply put, I, like many of you, am not the greatest at scheduling my time utilization through the course of a day. So while I want to write more and want at least some of that writing to be placed here for public consumption, based on my own history I will likely find myself in the future not writing. Here or anywhere else.

To bring today’s subject back to my primary purpose in life, a lot of my patients come in because some aspect of their life has become unmanageable to the extent they can no longer ignore it. I listen to them discuss whatever this aspect is and how bad it has gotten and eventually I find myself asking them all the same question: you know this issue (whatever it is) is not as you would like it to be, so why don’t you change it? They will ask one question and make one statement. The order of these varies and seems to have no real bearing on their issue but they will state one and then unvaryingly the other. the question is, “How do I change it?” And the statement is “I don’t have the time to change it.”

As I wrote in an earlier post all of us have the capacity to change and likely in the same levels. What we have in varying amounts is the willingness to utilize that capacity. Even though the change can be as simple as the recognition that change is necessary or that one has the capacity to change many of my patients will instead cling to the old and outdated belief that change is too hard, if it is possible at all. Sometimes the recognition is all it takes, sometimes the desire to be different is all it takes to become different. It really is that simple. and also, it is really that complex.

And look at that, another blog post is in the can…..