A Personal Pastime
Written on June 8th, 2015 by Tomás Zazueta
NOTE: This post is from my old WordPress archive. I first started blogging after graduating High School. I thought it would be a good idea to preserve some of these articles here.
For the past few years, I’ve picked up a habit of pacing throughout my house. I picked up this habit because I always had something on my mind, and I liked to be moving in order to keep my mind active. While other people pace as well, the frequency of my pacing is not to be understated: I have been pacing for at least an hour or more almost everyday for the past 7 or so years.
What I do while I pace is usually the same: I walk around the house listening to music. The music helps to focus my mind on the subject at hand. The music I listen to doesn’t really have anything to do with what I’m thinking about, it just keeps a nice rhythm to my thoughts. Sometimes I’ll mutter or talk to myself, but that’s only when no one’s around to hear it. For get that right amount of solace, most of my pacing is done at night. With enough energy and the right thoughts on my mind, I can pace until 2 in the morning.
The things I think about during my pacing stick to three main categories:
I. Character Sketches/Stories
This is my personal favorite. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been making stories with characters in my head. I can go over a pretty sizable private collection of stories that I have made up over the years. I go on to new stories after a while, sometimes because I get bored of the concept.
But another occurrence that causes me to give up on stories is something that still causes me great irritation. It’s when I notice that I’ve borrowed some concepts of my story from other popular works. It happened more frequently when I was younger, and I couldn’t really help it. A lot of the things we watch at a younger age is very impressionable on us. Nonetheless, I prefer to drop an story for a fresh one instead of carving out all the parts I took.
But the important thing about this story-building isn’t the stories themselves. It’s the characters in them. Many of the characters that I have in my stories have been taken out of older ones, with my of their personality traits intact. It is the characters that I prioritize instead of the story. To reintroduce them into another story revives them, and it gives continuity to my thoughts. The fact that many of my characters have stuck with me for so long has made much more “real” to me, in a way.
Another way that I show importance to my characters is that I have made them all affected by my stories. While some of my characters are weaker than others in terms of abilities or personalities; I have at least made my characters dynamic because of how they react to the stories in my mind. This, too, makes them more “real” to me.
But there is one thing that I do regret that I am unable to do for my characters. I am very bad at coming up with names for them. Of all the characters that I have made in the past few years, I can count the ones that I have given names to on one hand. In my story-building process, I sidestep the dialogue by having the characters address each other with pronouns.
If my stories were to be conveyed into text, they wouldn’t read like novels. They would read more like plays, with brief notes pointing out set pieces or actions that have occurred in the story. The bulk of my stories is dialogue and monologues given by some of my characters.
Given what I’ve said about the nature of my stories, you can guess at which pats of my pacing do I begin to talk to myself. I act out each of my characters, putting on certain qualities to my voice to get a better feel for how they would deliver lines and act. This is very entertaining for me. It allows for me to act, one of my most favorite hobbies.
I don’t think I’ll put my stories out in public. I wouldn’t know which ones to focus on, and I don’t really have much skill at writing stories. And, of course, I’d have a hard time finding names for everyone.
II. Thinking about my Future
I don’t do this a lot, but it is present during my pacing. I sometimes think about what I’ll be in the future. How far I am in the future varies. It can either be relatively recent, like how I will be in college. Sometimes, I go father and see how I can go into a career path.
I sometimes wonder what type of person I’ll be in college. I do know that I will focus on my studies, but in respect to extracurricular activities, I’m a little lost. I don’t know if want to be reserved or open with people. If I’m more open, then I can see myself getting involved in a lot of activities and having a good time. But being reserved can be beneficial in that it will let me have some form of solace in college. It is still something that I haven’t fully considered yet.
I explore many career paths during my pacing. It goes into three fields. I used to think a lot about the engineering path, but that has lost some focus as time goes on. Another path I think of is becoming a lawyer. This one is fun because it can split off into a lot of branches, from joining a firm to going into public office. Another path that I would be very interested in but I have never seriously considered is the path of entertainment. I always think of various entertainment careers that I would like to be, but it’s still something that I have to really consider if I ever want to devote my life to it.
III. Introspective Discovery
This is something that I don’t really do all the time. In fact, this only occurs after or during a conversation with someone. When I am messaging my friends, I will sometimes get up and out of my chair and think about what I’ve wrote and how they will receive it.
It is in this act of pacing that I think about how other people may see me, and how I outwardly express myself to others. This is one of the only ways that I ever really get a clear picture of myself. I can’t really take a hard look at myself directly. I have a much easier time of understanding people by seeing them from their perspective. In a way, the inverse applies to me. I can only really begin to understand myself by seeing myself in other people’s eyes.
So I have spent 7 years of my free time pacing and thinking about these things to myself. I’ve learned a lot and I have had fun along the way; because of that I can say that the time I spent pacing was of personal worth to me.
