Summer goals update: write weekly posts
If I could sum up my relationship with my habits and schedule, I would tell you that I have some good habits, some I’d like to change and that, overall, my biggest problem is leaving too many things to chance and the hope that I’ll simply feel motivated to act.
Example: get up, drink coffee, put on my running clothes and then assume I will find some time to run.
Example: make a list of to-do list that includes “ten minutes of writing,” which I assume I will feel inspired to do during some down time outside of my work and other responsibilities.
Example: decide that we need to do one load of laundry every day in order to avoid total chaos, and then not do this. Not even close.
When I think, big picture, about my life and the world right now, as crazy as it is, figuring out how to better automate actions like the above seems like the least important of the many items I could spend my time addressing.
And yet the fact that I don’t address items like these sabotages my time, so that I’m a less effective person overall. To be clear, I do get lots of things done, like going grocery shopping, doing my job and talking to Aidy about her LOL dolls in a manner that implies, and sometimes even actually involves, deep interest (I find this particular type of toy and its varied accessories - pom-poms! a record player! - delightful). It’s just that I let certain things go; things both very meaningful and very mundane, but important.
Example: I spend twenty minutes trying to find a pair of clean socks for Aidy, we are late to wherever we are going. The day is off to a bad start. I am not my best self! Life feels frantic!
Example: I am not often naturally inspired to write at a time I am actually able to do so. I question my very existence and creativity. Am I even a writer anymore?!
Example: Work and life gets in the way and I do not run.
I’ve read various books and essays about habits, and I’m not aiming to become a productivity machine or anything. I greatly enjoy a dalliance, a diversion, an impromptu walk, talk or cold beer. But I’d love for these joys to be less criminalized by the fact that I didn’t take the few minutes earlier that day (or the day before, omg) to put the laundry in the dryer and now it’s sitting there all damp and getting mildewy.
My greatest daily regret, however (not deep anguish, but sometimes real remorse) is not writing every day. Or, at least, most days.
I sometimes tell myself the wrong stories about my life. One of these is that, for someone who has spent the better part of her career as a professional writer, I haven’t written enough, which isn’t correct. I’ve written many, many words - perhaps too many - in published pieces and for you, my friends. While my tortured-artist type-self-critic is weaving the wrong narrative on this issue, it is true that I’ve always longed for a better writing practice, which is a term I really, really abhor for no good reason except that it strikes me as a little cocky. So I’m going to use “habit” instead. I’d like my writing habit to be less spur-of-the-moment and more predictable, not because I haven’t written enough in my life, but because writing it’s a passion and necessity deeply etched in my soul. I’d like to do it every day because it feels good and will yield more solid results.
(Note for the reader to consider: she is not ok using the term “writing practice” because it is “cocky”; is ok saying that writing is a “passion and necessity deeply etched in my soul.”)
So I recently began a ten-minute-a-day writing habit. I’ve tried this before and not stuck to it, and I don’t have any proof that this time will be different. But can say that at this point, several days in, it feels so good to take this time to write (as I’m doing this very moment) or edit essays which may have some future publish-able potential, that I am hopeful these positive emotions will fuel the mechanism itself.
That I will write weekly posts and then some, completing a summer goal that may go all-seasons.