The first day after I quit my job I felt an irrepressible excitement.

I was jumping up and down like a kid who had just started summer break. I was not just on a break. I was on an adventure — and I was starting to take back control of my life.

It’s nothing against my old job, and I appreciate my coworkers. But I had jumped through so many hoops from school to mid-career that I had lost touch with what sparks passion and joy. What had 35 years of doing as I was told accomplished? That’s the kind of question that’s hard to swallow for many older millennials.

Noise vs. signal. And life is indeed filled with extraneous clutter. Ask yourself this: how much time do you spend on emails and spam (personal and professional)? How much do you spend reacting to social media notifications and rants signifying nothing? On apps? On busywork? On meetings? On unwanted text messages? Has this noise gotten louder and more invasive over time?

Now ask: how much do you spend with family & friends? On doing what you’re passionate about? On creating memories? On being kind? On being mindful of your feelings? Clutter too often encroaches on our time and personal space.

Mindfulness demands wiping the slate clean. Much of what I’ve been doing in the first weeks of my gap year is removing the noise from my life. Step 1: quit job. Step 2: deactivate apps (you know which ones I’m talking about). Step 3: block emails and texts from SPAMMERs. (Political groups begging for money are usually the top offenders.) Step 4: toss a few extra items from apartment. Step 5: hit repeat.

(Re)Discovery. What’s remarkable is how quickly I’ve started rediscovering acts of joy. Take this example. I used to love watching movies, but more recently lost the attention span for feature length films. Sure enough, I started enjoying movies again as 2021 came to a close.

My two favorite movies so far have been the remake of West Side Story and Licorice Pizza. I think Licorice Pizza is probably the best film I’ve seen in a long, long time. (Is it just me or the city councilman was based on of the late senator Paul Wellstone?)

Speaking of food, I’ve started kicking my cooking up a notch too. I cooked my first NYT recipe — arroz con pollo verde. I’ll have you know it was a yummy as it looks. (Pictured above).

Delightful drawing. But the real icing on the cake has been re-immersing myself in the joy of making art. I’ve dived into this classic called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The book helps you shift from the left side of the the brain to the right. The left side isn’t very good at exact visualization because it focuses on descriptors like names and labels.

Most of the universe consists of edges, shades, and colors that have no name. That’s where the perceptive right side of the brain comes into play. It brings awareness to things as they actually are, not as humans label them.

Starting to flex the right side of the brain has freed me to see my surroundings in a refreshingly different light. What’s astonishing is that seeing the details of things that have no name is actually something I do quite well. I’m realizing I’ve suppressed this gift from childhood, in response to a culture that values verbal structure over visual acuteness. This literally made me blind to the way things are.

No longer! And that’s why learning to draw better has been a delight. And here we have my first gap year milestone. (My sketch below.)

What’s next? I’m visiting Singapore in February. That’s my first trip outside the States in a long while. Expect me to report on that in about a month’s time.