Last night my brain wouldn’t shift out of neutral but I was bound and determined to post something in this space. I wrote three posts, hated them all, and finally resorted to the second most LiveJournal-y thing* in the world: a list post.
Something went wrong with the whole process and the publish button refused to do anything even remotely resembling publishing. I opened a ticket with SquareSpace. I cursed a bit. I closed the laptop, and I went to sleep. When I reopened the laptop tonight, it locked up after I entered my password and I had to hard boot. The post was lost forever.
My list of “(Non-electronic) Things Which Are Better Now Than They Were 40 Years Ago” will never see the light of day, and the world is none the poorer for it. I feel like there’s a lesson having to do with doing things for the sake of doing them as opposed to doing them when you have reason to do so.
That, however, is a cruddy lesson. Practice and exercise are things you need to do even when you’re not of a mind to do them. However, the trick is to do them well even when you don’t feel it. The trick, for me, is to make sure that I do them well even when I’m not in the mood. Doing lazy work just to keep a streak alive is kind of pointless.
Maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe there is some value in the discipline of forcing yourself to do things even when your motivation flags. It’s just that going through the motions and doing half ass sit ups or calling your mum and then not really talking or listening, or writing a crummy list post just for the sake of crossing them off the list defeats the purpose of those activities.
Fortunately, there’s one thing I can salvage from that post. I really like the photo I ganked from the British Library archive so I’m re-using it as the header for this one. If you’re not familiar with this archive, check it out! It’s chock full o’ interesting images, free of charge.
-RK
* The first being a quiz, obvs.