Tag Archives: writing

Lost for words

The past few days I’ve been really stuck on my daily ink. The ideas are not flowing, and when they do come they feel more like essays than short daily writes. But then I’ve wasted too long staring at the blank page to have time to write long, drawn out ideas. So first my writing feels rushed, and then my whole morning routine does too.

This exercise of writing daily has been very positive for me. It has helped me feel creative. It’s not just an outlet for my writing it’s a drive to produce, to create something every single day.

Every. Single. Day.

Well recently I have felt like I don’t have a lot to share. I feel like the things I want to share infringe on the lives of people close to me that may not want their story shared publicly. And most of all I question myself, wondering why anyone would bother reading my daily dribble?

I remember a while back some people were sharing a daily photo. I love photography and tried a couple times to do ‘A Photo a Day’, but my love for photography made me stop both times within a couple weeks. I would look at these forced photos that I had taken and think to myself, ‘That’s a photo I had to take, not one I wanted to take.’ Then I’d quit.

I feel that way about writing right now… but I don’t want to quit. I don’t want a period of not feeling creative to undermine a habit I’ve built for almost 3 years now. What I’m fighting isn’t just writer’s block, it’s self doubt that I’d have anything else to share after all this time. Mental menopause preventing me from creating any fruitful work.

I’ll push through. I’ll accept that what I’m producing now will not be my best work. I’ll tell myself that the muse will come back. But for now it’s more of a chore than an expression of my passion for writing. I said earlier that I struggle with sharing stories of others that aren’t mine to share, well the story I can tell is my own. And for now, that story is how I’m struggling to write daily. The story to tell is that I’ll muscle through, and while it’s not easy, it’s not a time to give up either.

Actions, not words – Derek Sivers

I’m a fan of Derek Sivers. He’s someone who seems to have really figured out how to live life meaningfully and I think he lives a joyful life. Other people I follow live good lives, but I’m not sure they are truly happy. I think Derek is a rare kind of person that finds joy wherever he looks. He does what he wants to do, when he wants to do it, and is brutally honest with himself about what he really wants to do. I don’t think he spends a lot of time thinking, I really want to do ‘this’. He just decides to do it.

I’ve written specifically about him a couple times:

And I’ve mentioned him a few more times.

I listened to him on a podcast and this really hit a chord with me (related to his idea about goals, shared above):

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

How often do we have goals or plans that we never get to?

‘I’m going to start this project after…’

And no matter what we say next, something else comes up to delay us.

Or, ‘I really want to do this but…’

And after the ‘but’ comes an excuse about not having time, money, resources.

Do you really want to do it, or is it just wishful thinking?

I wanted to do a daily blog for years. I started this ‘Daily-Ink’ in 2010, but I didn’t really decide to do it until 2019. For 9 years it was wishful thinking. Then I decided: it’s not that I want to be a writer, I am a writer… and the way to be a writer is to write every day. So, it’s not even 6am yet, and I’m done my daily write.

Actions, not words… Or in my case the action of consistently writing words. 😃

Routines to return to

I’m learning that I need to stick to my routines even when I’m on holidays. This morning was a challenge because I did my usual morning routine after dinner last night and so I was wired and couldn’t fall asleep.

Write, meditate, exercise. When I start my day early enough to do those things, I have a great day. When I skip one, I spend much of the day thinking about when a will ‘catch up’, and that’s not a good use of my mental energy. And when it’s the workout that I miss, my physical energy isn’t there either.

What routines work for other people, how do you use your schedule to your own benefit?

Sometimes it will suck

I’m going to have to rush my morning routine because I’ve been writing ideas for my blog and each one of them will require more time than I have this morning to write them. So, I give them a title and shove them into my drafts for another day when I will be up earlier. And then I stared at the blank page, stuck.

On days like this I think of Seth Godin, who has written over 7,000 posts in his daily blog. Something that he wrote sticks with me… no matter how much you write, 50% of your work will be the worst 50%. You can’t escape this fact. So don’t worry about what you write, just write… and so today I’ll accept this post as the bottom half, but I am metaphorically putting pen to paper and I’ll hit ‘Publish’ soon. And maybe tomorrow I’ll put something in the top 50%… or at least the top 50% for now… because after another few thousand posts, who knows where it will rank?

Letting go of the worry of how good my writing is allows me to feel freer, and more open to sharing ideas. There is a time and place to think of just the right words, crafting an idea or even a sentence just the right way. And there are times to start writing and letting the words flow with little thought of how good the writing is. Sometimes suck is far better than stuck.

Tell me a story

I just listened to a short audio book, The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi,and performed by Zachary Quinto. The premise is far beyond the scope of believability, and there is no effort made to explain why this made up world works the way it does.

And it doesn’t matter.

It’s a wonderful short story and it is delivered with an engaging reading. That’s the power of good fiction and storytelling. You don’t have to believe that Hogwarts exists, or that there are mines in Middle Earth, or that there is an empire in a far, far away galaxy. What matters is that the authors take you on the journey with them, and that the journey is worthy to go on.

This year I plan listen to a lot more fiction. Recommendations are welcome!

Healthy living goals reflection 2021

It’s that time of year again when I look back at my healthy living goals sticker chart, and also plan for next year.

This was the post at the end of 2020. And this was for 2019, the year I started this.

2021 in review:

Workouts: 287days or 78.6%

Writing: Daily blog 100%

Meditation: 346 days or 94.8%

Archery: 129 days or 35.3% (Goal was 100 days so actually 129%.)

This was an awesome year for fitness. I am about 6-8 pounds heavier, with a fair bit of increase in size in my upper body and small but noticeable increases in my quads. I feel fit and strong, and I think I only had a couple minor slow downs from back pain, with minimal recovery time. I still need to stretch more, and I still rely a bit too much on deep massage therapy to keep the pain away, but I know that slow, careful strength progress, and more time using my standing desk at work, has significantly reduced the amount of regular pain I’ve had to deal with in my lower back.

Last year I did one more workout in the year… but it was a leap year so I’m going to call it even. I hope to maintain this next year too. Working out slightly more than 3 out of every 4 days for a full year is an excellent goal.

My daily blog has been going strong since July 2019… and while I could probably stop tracking this, I want to keep it as a goal for next year. The chart is a good motivator, and there is nothing wrong with having one of my goals be something that I commit to every single day.

Meditation: I missed 13 days from January to November, and 6 more in December. It has not been a good month for meditation. My goal this year was supposed to be tracking days when I meditate more than once to increase my time. I did this 6 times in January and didn’t continue. It did not become a habit. This year I want to increase the total time by going longer than 10 minutes on weekends, and doing more self-guided meditations mid week, so that mini lessons on the Calm App are not part of my meditation time. This is a more realistic way to take my daily meditation to the next level.

Archery was a new goal this year and I hoped to shoot a total of 100 days. I’m thrilled that I hit 129 days, and my goal next year will be 120.

So, no new goals next year, just a couple adjustments on my current goals. I do plan to write more, but I’m going to calendar that, rather than chart it. So 2022 will be about keeping the good habits going… if you have a few goals you’d like to track, buy yourself a year long calendar and make it happen! (Here are my tips.)

May your 2022 be amazing!

Milestone

I just checked, this will be the 999th post on this blog. But I had almost 100 posts before I started writing daily, 901 days ago, on July 6th, 2019. So I still have 99 more posts after this one to hit 1,000 Daily-Inks that are actually daily. Still, I feel like I’ve hit a milestone.

The title of this blog came from Stephen Down’s OLDaily, and a former student’s (now defunct) blog, Wandering Ink. Originally, I was writing in a journal and posting a photograph of my writing. It was a novel, but dumb idea. My writing is notoriously messy, and the effort to write something legible was time consuming and unlikely to be sustained. I also started it in China and used a tool, Posterous, or something like that, (also now defunct), to upload my images and posts. And so now all the images I posted are dead and unrecoverable. So some of my older posts look like this:

Who knows, maybe I already wrote a version of my recent post, Human Intersections, in September of 2010, but unless I dig up my old journal buried in a box in my garage, I’ll never know what I wrote in the old post?

Still, yesterday marked the 900th daily post. I haven’t checked month by month to see if I missed any days, but I know that I’ve been very consistent and if I missed any, it would likely be less than 3 posts in two-and-a-half years. I’m not checking. I’m satisfied to call this daily.

Sometimes it’s really tough to get something out. I wrote 5 (now deleted) paragraphs on two separate ideas before I checked my stats for the first time in months and discovered how many posts I am at. Sometimes I start to write something and think I need to put it away as a draft and work on it when I have more time. Sometimes, like today, my writing wasn’t worth keeping. Other times I start to write and don’t pause until I am done.

But writing every day has been an amazing artistic outlet. It has given me the space and time to think creatively, and it has helped me commit to things because I’ve said them ‘out loud’.

And with that post 901 in a row is done. I won’t bother celebrating 1,000, I’ll just keep going and see where this leads me.

Waves and fluctuations

I’m an avid audio book listener, and I usually get through almost a book a week unless I am reading something that’s really long, then it could be two weeks. But I just took three weeks to listen to a 5-hour long book, and didn’t feel I got as much out of it as I had hoped.

One of my healthy living goals this year was to shoot arrows 100 days of the year. I’ve far exceeded that target, but last week I only shot once, and I think I might only get to shoot once this week. The long gaps have led me to be more inconsistent and two out of the last three outings have produced some of my lowest scores in months.

I’ve been doing really well in the gym and have added a few pounds in the past few months, but the past couple weeks I’ve been missing a few workouts or I’m working out, but not really pushing myself.

I’ve missed more meditations in the last 6 weeks than I’ve missed for the rest of the year. When I do meditate, it’s more like I am am having a quiet moment to think about random things. I can’t seem to focus on my breath any more than I could when I started my daily meditation routine almost 3 years ago.

I know that I can’t always be doing everything at my best, but usually the fluctuations vary and I am doing some things well while struggling in other areas. The only thing I’m still doing consistently is writing daily… but I’m finding that I’m quite slow and everything else in my morning routine needs to be rushed.

This isn’t some bigger issue that I’m aware of, I’m not feeling depressed or sad. I’m just in the wave trough of effort and enthusiasm of my routines, and hopefully going to move up to the crest soon. It’s just unusual to find myself ‘down here’ in so many aspects at once. I tend to find some balance that is missing. The question is, what do I do to get out of it? Do I focus on just one thing? Do I wake up earlier and give myself more time? Do I just accept the fluctuations and allow myself another week of going through the motions, knowing that I’ll find my way back, knowing that I can’t always bring my ‘A’ game to everything I do?

My indifference to trying to get out of this rut suggests to me that I need to allow myself this time. I’ll make sure that I don’t miss another meditation. I’ll try to see if I can get an extra session of shooting arrows in this week, even if it’s for half the time I usually shoot for. I’ll start a fictional novel even though I usually wait for the holidays to choose a book that I’m not learning from. None of these are huge steps, but each of them offer me an opportunity to move from trough to crest in one of these areas that I seem to be under-performing in.

More on writing every day

“When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can start working on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30pm because it’s ready, It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we are creative, we are creative because we ship. Take what you get, and commit to a process to make it better.” Seth Godin, ‘The Practice’.

Seth has written over 7,000 blog posts on his daily blog, dating back to 2002. One interesting point that he makes is that no matter how many posts he writes, 50% of them are his worst 50%, and not as good as the other half. It’s impossible to do better than that. It’s not about doing great work every day, it’s about ‘shipping’ work every day. It’s about being creative every day, it’s about the process… the practice.

I’ve written pieces that I’ve thought were quite good, and no one will probably ever look back at them. I’ve knocked off a quick post with little thought, and it garnishes comments and positive feedback… and occasionally these two things coincide. But it’s not accolades or attention that matters to me nearly as much as the commitment to write every day. To do the creative work. To wordsmith, to ponder, to question, and to practice the art of writing.

So forgive the typos, the comma splices, the run on sentences. Indulge me when I intentionally break convention. Like this. This is my muse, and I do my best to ship every day. And exactly half of the time, you’ll get better than average work from me.

It comes down to this

I just deleted 3 paragraphs that led up to me writing this:

If you can’t take care of yourself during your busiest times, then you aren’t actually taking care of yourself.

That’s the whole post. No excuses, no postponing, no making up for it later. Take care of yourself. You’ll get more done and feel better doing it.