Letter 47: November 24, 2008
I was going to call my (unwritten) writer's block self-help book "Procrastinate Now!" until a simple Google search showed me that I am the 52,501st person to think of the phrase. Oh well.
Meanwhile: by the time you read this, which will be several days after its cover date (and I have the best imaginable reason for thinking so!) we will have finished celebrating Thanksgiving here in the US. What do we have to be thankful for? I leave you to answer that question for yourself. I have some answers of my own but that's not the purpose of our meeting.
If we're thankful, to whom shall we be thankful? And you can answer that one for yourselves too.
I was persuaded to (US readers, read "convinced to") spend the holiday weekend doing almost nothing useful. I'm thankful for that. I actually managed to do nothing much for three days, and some lightly productive activity on the fourth. This is very unusual indeed for me, and a welcome change.
What happened? - all my projects came to a challenging exhausting head at once, earlier in the week. Sometimes that happens. Call it bad planning, call it great planning. And now I'm in the delightful idle-without-guilt stage. Not that there is ever really a time with nothing to do, but sometimes there is time to do nothing.
And over the next few weeks I'll start imagining there's enough free time to take on all sorts of exciting new projects, and before you know it...
but you do know it.
So what's the point this week? Nothing clever. Just that it's permissible to work very hard, provided we don't do it all the time.
We tend to forget our achievements and to focus on the not-yet-done and on the not-yet-successful. And so we drive ourselves, and we use words like "lazy" and "procrastinate". And as I've said before, using those words may be a mistake. Great productive creators take time off, suffer from "block", have long fallow periods, just like the rest of us. And it's ok, because they are remembered for what they produced.
When I mentioned an unwritten book on writer's block ^^^up^^^there^^^, you may have taken it as a joke. The subject of writer's block brings up a kind of embarrassed, avoidant humor. But I do have an unwritten book on it. Having mentioned it to you, I spent a few minutes thinking about it, and now I remember that the book was outlined years ago and that most of the chapter contents are already lurking among the 100,000 or so unpublished words I've written on the subject at various times. See? - we forget our achievements and focus on the other things. For goodness's sake, let's give ourselves a break.
Something you can try today: breathe.
Seriously, it's all right to take time off.
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
To get this newsletter every week, enter your email address below.
Privacy policy: I'll send you nothing but the weekly letter, and I'll never voluntarily share your address with anyone.