Today’s assignment was to learn to free-write. Don’t think. Don’t edit. Just go. So here I go.
At 10:13 pm. Ugh. I really need to get a better handle on my evenings so I am not writing at the very moment I should be tucking my hiney in bed.
I’ve realized something as I have been doing this challenge each day. I am not good at just doing one thing at a time. One of my strengths is multi-tasking. Another is being strategic, or strategery…just kidding I just wanted to say “strategery” in my head because it sounds funny. Anyway I digress…
Being a multi-tasker and a strategic person is awesome in my work environment. However, when I evaluate its usefulness in my personal life, I am seeing a trend. I am seeing that I don’t allow myself to walk thoughtfully through a day. I don’t allow myself the pace of doing one thing at a time and fully being present in that one thing.
I am attacking life like my survival depended on it.
Don’t get me wrong, I have lived years in survival mode for very good reasons in my past, but right now, this very season I am in, it’s not a necessary mode in which to operate.
I have a good and stable job. I can get a coffee or go out to eat on occasion if I want to. I have a comfortable and warm place to sleep. I have an amazing husband who is my best friend. Life’s good people.
And yet, I rush and rush and somehow avoid the very thing I long for. REST. And I don’t avoid it because I don’t like it. I think I avoid it because I’m not sure how to do it.
My friends in college years and years ago made a statement to me in regards to relaxing or resting. They said, “When you try to relax, you get nervous.” Ha! How true. When I sit still it makes me want to panic.
This is a problem.
As I have found this passion to write each day, I realize all the things my days are full of that I have felt MUST BE DONE NOW. Some of them are important and valid and necessary.
Others are convenience, preference, desires. Those are the ones I need to get a handle on so they stop making me feel so manhandled at the end of each day.
I am enjoying very much what this challenge is helping me see already.
I have set my mind on making sure I complete this one task each day. 500 words. Because that is my one chosen thing to focus on I am seeing clearly now all the extraneous stuff that can probably wait or be done once a week rather than every day.
I am seeing why it is that I have never been very successful at this before. My mind operates like a blue laser scanner assessing its next target and then the next and the next, and so on.
The targets are the tasks in my multi-tasking universe and there are just too many coming at me at one time.
In my attempt to shoot each one down I don’t see that the true treasure I’m after is being passed by as I vroom vroom through the space and time I occupy.
I can’t shoot all the ships down all the time, but I can focus on the one target I have chosen and vroom in that direction with all my heart.
I’m kind of having a Star Wars moment right now. You know where Luke leaves all the ships above and dives down into the tunnel to go after the center of the death star? His course is set, no turning back. STAY ON TARGET!
My TARGET is to learn that I can write every day and I’m doing it people! I’m doing it!
And holy smokes I’ve written over 600 words….target destroyed! Whoohoo!
Now for REST. Victory.
