Essay: On not getting things done.

It has been awhile since I wrote an essay.  The average temperature was 45 degrees, whereas now it’s 60 degrees.* I haven’t written an essay since February and with each passing week it gets harder and harder to think of something to write about.

My brain feels flabby.  This is not unlike the feeling I get when I attempt to do pushups after I “haven’t gotten around” to them for some time.  So it’s hard for me to think of things to write about and hard for me to sit down and write and just hard in general to get back on that horse/get back into the game/get on up/get to it.

And I love writing, so there really isn’t any reason I shouldn’t be writing.  It’s just that sometimes, when I get stopped, starting becomes harder again with every passing day.  I’d like to say this is a problem just with writing, but it happens again and again.  Currently, I’ve missed a few days** of my 15-minutes-per-day-of-weeding plan, and it is very hard to get back out there.

It seems when I don’t do a regular thing regularly that the “not doing” piles up larger and larger in my brain.  From the small slice of garden I can see right now, things haven’t much changed in a week and getting back out there wouldn’t be any big deal.  But in my mind I find it hard to break the “not doing” cycle and get back out there.

I’m not entirely sure why this happens to me, but I’ve got a few theories.***  One is that I have too many interests.  I stopped writing essays because the class I was taking started taking up more and more of my time.  But then I didn’t start again after the class was over because I was sewing a dress and that took up the time that was going to the class.  Aside from general household and body maintenance (cleaning, working for pay, exercising, meditating, keeping track of finances and cooking) here’s what I would love to be doing every day:  writing, gardening, sewing, playing and singing music, and reading.  A normal day means doing all of the things above in the parentheses and maybe one other thing from my love to be doing every day list.  This means that once per week I get to do one thing from that list.  It’s rather discouraging.

I would love to arrange things otherwise, but until a large chunk of my day doesn’t go toward working for pay, I have to grab the bits and pieces I can and integrate them the best I can.  Or, I could let go of most of those interests, which doesn’t seem like that much fun to me.  So sometimes things get left behind, sometimes things get dropped entirely.  Sometimes it just takes me longer to find my way back to things than I would like.  But this is a good first step.

*This is a made-up fact.

** “a few days” is what I always use to describe the period I haven’t been doing something periodical.  It can mean anything from a few days to a few months to a few seasons.

***My mind never shuts off, so thinking of theories doesn’t ever stop.