Thursday, November 10, 2011

Enough


            New Years’ Resolutions have always bothered me. I’ve never made them and I never will. People ask me why and I explain to them it just doesn’t make sense. If it’s important enough to you to change, why do you need to wait until a holiday to do it? If you need the holiday for it to be important to you then it surely won’t work long term.
            One thing that my dad always tells me is - when it’s important enough to you, then you will change it. That advice has been hitting ever closer to home over the past month or so.
            I’ve had a pretty crazy week. Between beginning a new semester, changing jobs, keeping up with my writing, and trying to find some time to be social, my calendar is pretty full. As I’ve been examining everything I have going on, however, I have really grown to appreciate the grounding forces I do have: art, music, writing, and reading - the little things.
             The constraints are frustrating, though. As most creative types probably understand very well, everything flows smoother when you have larger blocks of time on your hands. I have two novels  currently in process and I find myself getting a good way in, then getting bogged down and when I come back, it’s like seeing an old acquaintance after five years apart.
            Long story short, I’ve reached my ‘enough’ point that my dad has been telling me about. Whether I have to get up at 5 am or work into the silent hours of the morning (which are wonderful for writing by the way), I have decided that I need to readjust my priorities. Certainly school and work have to come first, but I’m not fulfilled without have time to work on my novels. I lose a little piece of myself every day that I can’t find time to work them into my schedule, and I refuse to let it keep happening.
            In an attempt to make a cliché about clichés - clichés exist for a reason. Life is just too short to feel that way for more than a few days in a row, so I’m changing it.
            Here’s to knowing what you love, knowing that it makes you a better person, and finding a way to keep it in your life.


P.S. I've decided I'm going to start posting a quote at the end of my thoughts from now on, something that relates to what I've been writing about that day. Maybe make a game out of who can guess the person who said it (I'll add a picture to make it easier). Here's today's:

"It is so easy to be hopeful in the daytime when you can see the things you wish on. But it was night, it stayed night. Night was striding across nothingness with the whole round world in his hands"

2 comments:

  1. You're exactly right, Matt. We do find a way to make time for those things that are really important to us. Complaining without action results in an enormous amount of negative energy. Glad you're taking steps to actively rebalance!

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  2. It's easy to become a "mile wide and an inch deep". Sometimes its better to narrow the visors a bit and just work on one project exclusively for a day or so. Trying to keep several projects going simultaneously necessarily embodies quite a bit of wasted time as one shifts from project to project and tries to come back up to speed.

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