Write, or write about writing? Do, or write about doing?
It can be useful to stop and reflect and record, but it can be dangerous to delay moving forward. To disrupt momentum. To navel gaze. Just as it can be dangerous to never stop and savor, internalize, process.
How to choose which activity is most needed?
Today would have been hard if all I had to do was go to my studio and spend some time working on big thoughts for my novel, then go to work and spend some time working on work stuff, then squeeze in chores and working out, then cap the night off at a friend’s.
But that wasn’t today.
Today was communicating back and forth with said friend about if we could move our hang out time, and if it included dinner, and if I had time to do the working out or chores at home first. Today was finding out the wind knocked out the power at work and that everyone was disbanding and going to try to remotely run a meeting as their power at home flashed on and off. Today was feeling guilty for not being more productive because I was daunted by the effort and riskiness involved in trying to do things from my personal computer because I haven’t been provided with a work computer that I can use remotely to do my work. Today was finding out that the filling I got yesterday caused sensitivity when I chew. And figuring out, if I’m not going into work, where I can heat up my lunch. And wondering if my power at home or at the studio is going to go out at any minute, too, and then where would I go and what would I do?
And now it’s only 2:45pm, and I’m only halfway through my day, and already I’m spent from decision-making and plan-switching. I have done all the easy work work I can do remotely, but the guilt about not being able to do more adds weight to the context-switch back to the novel that is always there and could always benefit from a little extra time. And the novel work is hard today. The novel work is novel, in that other sense of the word. There’s no plan for it, only discovery, and learning, and trying stuff.
It doesn’t do me any good to waffle indefinitely. And so I shrug, open up a blank document, and write something, anything, this.