I didn’t want to get up yesterday. I woke up at 5:30, when my alarm wasn’t going off till 6, and thought about not getting out of bed for a while. Only I had to go to the bathroom, so that didn’t work for long. But I tried.
One thing I thought while I lay there? I didn’t want to go outside and deal with my plants. Too much effort, I thought. Couldn’t they just take care of themselves?
Well no. Clearly they can’t. They’ll reach the point where they don’t need watered every day, but not for a while yet—at the very least, they need bigger pots to hold water for more than a day!
Not all of them need watering every day, though. Surely the bigger ones would rather NOT be watered every day? So, I promised myself. No dealing with the irrigation (which STILL isn’t all put together.) No repotting anything. All I had to do was water the plants that wouldn’t last the day without it, and then I could be done.
Once I got out there, that’s not how it went. I watered the plants that needed it. Then I saw the rosemary that’s been under attack by spider mites, and remembered treating it three times a week meant it was time to do that. So I did.
Then I realized that if I repotted the tomatoes I’d accidentally planted three together in a pot (my hand slipped or something, I don’t know) separately while they were tiny, it might be soon enough that they weren’t too entwined and they might all survive. So I wandered around finding pots, dealt with dirt, got more water, repotted, watered, puttered…
I still didn’t work on the irrigation, but I ended up doing all the other stuff I’d told myself I didn’t have to do. And I enjoyed it! I do love puttering in my back yard before it gets hot. And I know that I love it. Why do I whine about it?
This same thing happens with my writing. I’ve been making wonderful progress since I started doing write-ins with online writer friends, shortly after being furloughed from work. Did I want to write twice a day every single day? No. Did I enjoy it once I started? Pretty much always. But it wasn’t love of writing that made me show up; it was the fact that I’d told people I would be there, and the determination that when I’m in a write-in, I actually attempt to write, not just hang out posting fake word counts to encourage my friends to write while I didn’t. (How would that even make sense? I don’t know. Look, my brain is a weird place, all right?)
Breaking News: Actually attempting to write can often lead to actual words being produced.
I know, I was shocked too. Even though I knew that’s how it worked! You see, years ago I took this online course on being a better student (or something like that.) One important thing I got from it, is how we just don’t want to start, but if we can push through for something like 15 minutes, a lot of the bad feelings about the thing just go away.
Our brains literally throw out obstacles to keep us from doing things we actually want to do. How messed up is that?? But then our brains get over themselves, and off we go.
However rude it seems (very!) apparently the trick is to push on. That resistance melts after a few minutes. Supposedly.
In my experience? Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t, but even if I’m hating every minute, if I stick with a write-in for an hour, I get a non-negligible amount of words. And later I can’t tell what I wrote when I was hating life and what was written with happiness. As much as I hate it when I’m writing it, it’s actually mostly pretty good.
Brains. They’re weird. What you gonna do?