Okay, so you’re asking about my time with that whole “Spenser Hawk” stuff. It’s not some magic trick, you know. It was just… a phase I went through, a weird experiment.
I guess it all started when I was in a real slump. Had this job, data entry, just soul-crushing stuff. Felt like my brain was turning to mush, day in, day out. At the same time, my band, the one thing I really cared about, had just spectacularly imploded. Years of work, down the drain. So yeah, I wasn’t exactly in a great place, just trying to keep my head above water and pay the bills.
One rainy Saturday, I was poking around this tiny, dusty second-hand bookstore, the kind that smells like old paper and forgotten stories. Tucked away on a bottom shelf, I found this slim, unassuming book. Plain grey cover, title was something like “Quiet Reflections” or “The Inner Craft,” by a guy named Spenser Hawk. Never heard of him. I flipped through it. It wasn’t your usual self-help garbage. This was dense, almost poetic, talkin’ about attention, the dignity of small tasks, finding some kind of meaning in the mundane. Seemed like the ramblings of an old craftsman or something.
Trying to Make Sense of Hawk
Normally, I’d have just put it back. But I was desperate. I bought it for a couple of bucks, figured, what’s the harm? So, I started trying to actually do what this Spenser Hawk fella was on about. It wasn’t easy. His “methods,” if you can even call them that, were super vague. Stuff like “listen to the silence between tasks,” “treat your tools as companions,” “find the rhythm in the repetition.” Honestly, it sounded like a load of baloney at first.
I decided to give it a real shot with that awful data entry job. My first step was just trying to focus on one single spreadsheet cell. Imagine that. Like it was the most important thing in the universe. My colleagues, they must’ve thought I’d finally cracked. I’d stare at my screen, then take these weird, deliberate breaks to just look out the window, or sip my coffee real slow. Hawk talked a lot about “rituals.” So, I made little rituals for starting my computer, for taking a break, for finishing a task. Sounds silly, right?
For weeks, I felt like a complete idiot. I’d try to “befriend the silence” in our noisy open-plan office. Good luck with that. I’d try to “observe the grain of the work” while inputting endless strings of numbers. The “grain” usually felt like sandpaper on my soul.
What Actually Happened
But here’s the strange part. Slowly, very slowly, something started to shift. Not the job. The job still sucked. I started to feel different. A little bit. The constant chatter in my head, the replays of the band breaking up, the anxiety about the future – it didn’t disappear, but it got a bit quieter. By forcing myself to pay attention to these tiny, boring things, like Hawk suggested, I guess I was accidentally practicing some kind of mindfulness before it was cool.
I even started noticing things. The way the afternoon sun would hit my keyboard. The specific hum of the ancient office printer. Dumb stuff, but it was like the world went from black and white to having a few muted colors. This Spenser Hawk, he wasn’t about “being productive” for the company. It felt more like he was trying to teach you how to be okay inside your own head, no matter what crap you were dealing with.
I didn’t become some data entry superstar. Far from it. But that weird discipline, that attempt to find some meaning, it sparked something else. I started writing again. Not songs, not then. Just little observations, thoughts, trying to capture those tiny moments, kind of like Hawk wrote. It wasn’t for anyone else, just for me.
Eventually, that little flicker of creativity, that feeling of being a bit more present, it gave me the push I needed. I started looking for other work, something that wouldn’t make me feel like a zombie. And I found it. Took a while, but I did.
So, that Spenser Hawk experiment? I don’t really follow his “musings” anymore. The book’s probably gathering dust somewhere. But the experience of trying to live that way, even for a little while, during a really rough patch? It stuck with me. It showed me that even when things are terrible, you can find a way to engage, to reclaim a little bit of your own inner space. It’s not about changing the world, sometimes it’s just about changing how you look at your own tiny corner of it.
Yeah, that was my Spenser Hawk journey. A weird detour, but maybe one I needed to take.
