I was watching Oprah yesterday, which honestly, I don't normally do, but I was bored at home and flicked the TV on and there it was. They were talking about a book 'A New Earth', which I have neither read nor heard about until yesterday.
The little slice which I did watch though was a good reminder to me. It made me realise that when I accepted the challenge to publish a novel this year I started living in the future - I was thinking so far ahead that I was virtually incapable of living in the now and actually getting the work done. I think this can happen in a lot of situations, and I know individuals who have a really hard time with this. Before yesterday I hadn't thought that it could be such a problem, but now I see that sometimes it can.
For me it meant that I got too focused on the outcome I wanted to see that it meant I had a hard time getting on with the work that would get me there. I've struck this a couple other times, last year was a major one for me where I was so obsessed with getting the right grades for my papers in order to move onto Master's that I was too stressed out to function. If I hadn't just let it go and said to myself 'whatever happens will happen, and it will be ok', I would have ended up failing just about everything. And ya know, I didn't get good enough grades, but I did pass every single paper and I'm happy about that - I realized that wasn't the path I wanted to go down anyways so all that stress and worry and anxiety was for nothing.
Life tends to work out how it's going to, and while making plans and looking forward to your future can be a good thing, getting so stuck in thoughts about it that you end up gimping yourself is not helpful at all.
I got back to basics with the writing thing anyways. I decided awhile back that it wouldn't matter if I never got published, and that has brought a lot of the joy back to it for me, freed my mind up and now it's being creative and lovely for me. I have some energy and passion for it again and I love that, I missed it so badly.
Life is for living, and enjoying. Don't get too wrapped up in the future because life is right here in the now. We all need to be reminded of that from time to time.
The little slice which I did watch though was a good reminder to me. It made me realise that when I accepted the challenge to publish a novel this year I started living in the future - I was thinking so far ahead that I was virtually incapable of living in the now and actually getting the work done. I think this can happen in a lot of situations, and I know individuals who have a really hard time with this. Before yesterday I hadn't thought that it could be such a problem, but now I see that sometimes it can.
For me it meant that I got too focused on the outcome I wanted to see that it meant I had a hard time getting on with the work that would get me there. I've struck this a couple other times, last year was a major one for me where I was so obsessed with getting the right grades for my papers in order to move onto Master's that I was too stressed out to function. If I hadn't just let it go and said to myself 'whatever happens will happen, and it will be ok', I would have ended up failing just about everything. And ya know, I didn't get good enough grades, but I did pass every single paper and I'm happy about that - I realized that wasn't the path I wanted to go down anyways so all that stress and worry and anxiety was for nothing.
Life tends to work out how it's going to, and while making plans and looking forward to your future can be a good thing, getting so stuck in thoughts about it that you end up gimping yourself is not helpful at all.
I got back to basics with the writing thing anyways. I decided awhile back that it wouldn't matter if I never got published, and that has brought a lot of the joy back to it for me, freed my mind up and now it's being creative and lovely for me. I have some energy and passion for it again and I love that, I missed it so badly.
Life is for living, and enjoying. Don't get too wrapped up in the future because life is right here in the now. We all need to be reminded of that from time to time.
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