Resting or decaying?

When does "taking a break" turn into "acting like a vegetable?"

Since I've come home from Tunisia, I've done not much of anything--except watch TV. In Tunisia, I watched TV maybe twice. I thought I had broken myself of the habit. But since I have been home, I have fallen back into my routine of using it as company. It's really bad, boring company, but, just like real, live, human company, I end up paying attention to it. Of course, it is rude to ignore human company, even if they are boring. But TV, I can turn off. I know that it just sucks the life out of me and my creativity.

In Finding Flow, which I am browsing through once again, now that I'm back from Tunisia, Csikszentmihalyi writes

...a simple way of improving the quality of life is to take ownership of one's actions. A great deal of what we do (over two-thirds, on the average) are things we feel we have to do, or we do because there isn't anything else we feel like doing. ... Under these conditions we are likely to feel that our psychic energy is wasted.

Well, I know that TV wastes my psychic energy. So, I have just turned it off. And I plan to keep it off, not using it as company. Heck, I have company. I have great friends here in Georgia, whom I missed while I was away. And I have things I want and need to do.

I want to write more--my novel, travel articles, essays. I want to publish.

I want to speak more--I want achieve my CTM in Toastmasters (I know that they changed the designation, but I don't like the CC tag.) I want to become a professional speaker and give seminars on creativity.

I want to teach. I want teach both writing and speaking, helping people develop two very basic skills that get buried in their high school curricula, but which turn out to be so important in everyday lives.

These three items at the top of my to-do list are all creative, but they take psychic energy. And I think that psychic muscles are just like physical muscles. They need to be exercised daily, or they will atrophy. I exercised my psychic muscles every day when I was in Tunisia--I was writing a lot, I was fully engaged with life--seeing new things, making new friends. But now that I'm home, I'm falling back into some of the bad habits I had. I think a lot of people indulge in bad habits at home. They sit on the couch and pig out. They aren't polite to their family members. They act like slobs.

The antidote, I believe, is to pay attention--to give psychic energy to the things that are important, not to the blasted, veggie-matic thing called TV.