That Fire

One of the big things on my mind lately has been the question of why I feel the need to do so much on a daily basis. I talked about yesterday how I’m trying to push most of my tasks to the weekdays so I can have the weekends to myself. I’m simplifying my weekdays so my weekdays aren’t overloaded with stuff I’m implicitly promising to myself. I’m drastically simplifying my morning and nightly routines, and I’m trying to make more room for both fun and rest. I’m obsessively organizing my OmniFocus lists with tasks and projects that I hope cover all the important areas of my life, but I’m going to try to do them in a more lenient way by doing them when I feel like it. Simple, right?

For example, I didn’t workout today because I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel like it because I was tired all day and hungover from the four bottles of wine I drank this weekend, and I was hungry, really really hungry. I don’t want to punish myself for not doing something, and I’m going to try to be nicer to myself. Now that I’m finished with my novel, I’m going to lay it aside for a while so I can spend more of my time reading and hopefully come up with good ideas to make the novel better. I also subscribed to the New Yorker today, and I want to spend more time reading these issues cover to cover on a weekly basis.

The first eight months of this blog were amazing. I’ve never been as productive as I was during that time, and I’m so proud of all the work I accomplished. I got a job, I finished my novel, I drove to California and back, I wrote non-stop for 267 days, and I did one of the hardest workout programs for over 200 days. Now it’s summer and I want to relax before fire season starts. School’s out, and I need to upgrade a couple hundred computers to Windows 8.1, and I need to figure out my next steps. There’s still a lot of stuff I want to do, but for most of that, time is not of the essence. I want to slow down and really figure this out.

This blog barely gets any hits nowadays; I’m lucky if I get one reader during a week. I know that’s because the quality is virtually nonexistent, and that’s okay. I’m mostly writing this for myself and my own cathartic experiences. Maybe my words have helped people or will help them, I don’t know. I just know they have helped me, and that was the point. Maybe by giving myself more time to relax and maybe read, then maybe that rest will rejuvenate me and my writing will improve. Until then, I just have to take each entry one day at a time until that fire inside my belly reignites and compels me to do something amazing.