I’m going to have to start doing that thing where I carry a tiny notebook with me everywhere, to write down random thoughts I have. Throughout the course of my day I think of many things I might like to write about, but, recently, whenever I sit down to write, I’m blank. And then this thing I’m doing feels like a slog.
I used to be good at slogs. My life was just one long slog.
Then I got sick of it, and I got much better at whims. For a while, my life became a fantastical, disjointed string of whims.
Once I’d taken the time to recover from pissing away all my energy on grinding ineffectively for an ego-driven life, it began to emerge that, probably, living on whims wasn’t going to get me much further.
I wanted to believe, on some level, that I could bypass future slogs by successfully harnessing motivation. I began trying to learn the secret of inspired action.
I still haven’t learned it, really, because I’m still facing a slog. Several slogs, in fact. I still have too many ideas tugging at my focus and, in between brief bouts of clarity, the result is overwhelmingly a sort of white noise.
Holding onto any single strand of inspiration long enough to mean anything is tricky for me. I’m starting to accept that resurrecting my ability to slog may be the right way forward. To relearn how to wade through the silty mud when the tide’s gone out, instead of sitting down to wait.
I have conflicting ideas about this, still. I think I still believe it’s possible to avoid the slog – not the hard work, but the work that feels unnecessarily hard. And so my reaction when I see the mud up to my ankles is where did I go wrong here? Well, maybe I did go wrong, maybe I didn’t, but the fact of the matter is there is mud up to my ankles, and I’ve got too much shit to get on with to just languish in it.