You've been running since your feet hit the ground this
morning at 7:00 am. The commute to work was a nightmare; you scraped yourself
off the clock for lunch an hour (or two) later than usual; every minute has
been crammed with tasks, meetings, rogue emails; someone on the opposite end of
the country desperately needs your
help to fix a problem that you just don’t have the time to take care of. But
they've sent you four emails already, and you know that if you leave them alone
they’ll call next. They have your number after all. They probably know where
you live.
And before you know it, you’re exhausted, frazzled, and ready
to shut your brain off as soon as the screen of your computer reads 5:00 pm.
How do we motivate ourselves to write on days like these, of
which there are usually too many in a row? My example only pertains to those of
us with an office life, but there are so many other distractions that can drain
our energy and our will to sit down and set aside time for creative practice. Perhaps
the kids today just would not leave you
alone for one minute PLEEEASE can we go outside???? You had to pick up an extra
shift because two co-workers are sick and, let’s face it, you need the money.
Or your professors have all seemed to match their schedules so that you are
loaded up with three exams and four papers all due in the same week.
Life is constantly dragging us away from our art. And it’s
not just writing that suffers. The pile of books to be read next to your
bedside table starts to resemble a tower, probably topped by a flaming eye that
glares at you every night with steely judgment as you crawl into bed, exhausted,
having not turned a single page. You haven’t connected with friends or family
in over a week. And all the things that offer you relaxation and rejuvenation from
the stresses of your “real life” just get pushed off the schedule, one after
the other.
We think back fondly of the days when it seemed that we had
so much free time for all these hobbies! Remember the days when we could sit
down and write for hours? Other than professional writers, who has the time to
do that anymore?
The answer, my friends, is the people who make the time.
Yes. I know. You’re rolling your eyes. I’m even rolling my eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I love temporal
metaphysics and time travel and relativity. If you mention ‘causal loops’ you
will have my attention riveted. But when someone says “Well, you just have to
make the time to do something,” I tend to get an immediate reaction in my gut
that pushes against the idea.
But what are we resisting against? Semantics, really. If we
want to break it down, time is like energy (a bad analogy – if you’re scientifically
minded, bear with me here). It cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes
form. And the way you can change the form of your time is to make sure you carve
it up in ways that serve your needs.
Somehow, we all manage to get to work on time. We pay our
bills. We buy our groceries. We are capable of setting schedules and sticking
to them. And it’s the sad truth of the manic world that we have to do the same
thing to make sure we have time to write. Of course you won’t find the time to write
if you are not strict with making sure it’s on your schedule. Not when there
are a million other things that need to be done. (By the way, you can’t find extra time collecting dust under
your couch any more than you can make
new time on a whim; sadly we have to work with what we've been given).
I wrote recently on the argument of writing every day. For
many of us, such a schedule is demoralizing and unproductive. But that doesn't
mean we can dodge the bullet and write without structure. There is too much
going on in our busy world to hand our writing over to the chance that we might
actually remember to do it today if we have a spare moment. Realistically, that’s
probably not going to happen. Nature abhors a vacuum. A schedule abhors a blank
space. Your spare time will get filled up with something if you don’t fill it
first.
So pick a day, or even a few days, every week where you sit
down and write. Make it your moment to clear your head and breathe. You might
not be creating the next classic, but you will be keeping your writing muscles
from getting atrophied. And if you have an active project that you are working
on, you will be slowly but surely moving towards your goal.
Trust me – as much as it may hurt to force yourself to
write, I promise it hurts more to not write at all.
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