Lent

For the last few years, I participated in a sort of secular Lent, where I give up something for non-religious reasons. This year, though, I'm drawing a blank for something I could reasonably do without. In previous years, I've given up things like sleeping in (because college) and particular foods I gorge myself on.

I'm not sure why I'm having trouble with this, because my life is definitely still not where I'd like it to be. But there's very few things on my bug list that really fit the binary conception of Lent. There's things it might be good to cut back on, or repurpose, or something—but a lot of my continued struggles boil down to a profound lack of control over my schedule and environment. It's hard to tease out what I could do independently that would have a genuine positive impact.

(Case in point: I just had to get up and go teach Dad how to decompressed a thread in Gmail, which took way longer than it should have because he didn't explain that he was looking for additional responses, rather than different messages entirely.)

I'm not religious, though; I don't feel any particular obligation to endure privations—quite the opposite. Maintaining the trend would be nice, yes, but hardly mandatory. So perhaps I'll just indulge some actual secularism this year, and give up an unnecessary and unsupported tradition.