Tag: momentum matters

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Childish Energy

Pavowski2 Comments

Child, Cool, Dress, Fun, Hero, Red, Feeling, Kid, Boy

Tap, tap, tap.

It’s six AM on a Saturday, and my 4-year old is tapping on my forehead.

“Daddy, it’s Friday o’clock. It’s time to wake up.”

I grumble and open one eye at him. “Friday isn’t a number, Sprout. Time has to be a number.”

He thinks about this and says, “Dad, it’s Saturday o’clock.” Which is closer to correct.

I pull the sheet over my head. He climbs up on the bed and jumps on me. Why? Because he’s awake, the sun is coming up, and he’s ready to start his day of watching cartoons, eating fruit, drinking chocolate milk, running around in the yard, tormenting his little sister, chasing the cats, coloring on the walls, and all the other things he has to do. His schedule is a giant blank slate, but he runs from one thing to the next like he’s trying to stretch out time by moving close to the speed of light.

Seriously. He runs everywhere. To the kitchen. To the bathroom. Up the stairs to his room. To the car. After the dog. In circles around the coffee table. Everywhere. And, to shamelessly reminisce upon my post from a couple weeks ago, he does nothing halfway. With every task, every diversion, he throws himself into it like … well, like a 4-year-old hurling himself into a bouncy house.

He’s that kid that adults see and think, I wish I had that kind of energy. Imagine what we could get done! But the fact is, we do have that kind of energy, we’ve just forgotten how to channel it. We work at jobs that wear us out physically or mentally or emotionally or all of the above. We come home from those jobs tired, wanting nothing more than to collapse on the couch and watch The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or whatever Netflix show is binge-worthy this week. And it’s all we can do to haul ourselves into bed a few hours later to steal a few hours of blessed sleep before it’s time to do it all again. We don’t have energy because our momentum sucks.

We watch TV because it’s that time of day. We heave ourselves out of bed after hitting the snooze button three times because we can’t put it off any longer.

Meanwhile, my son has seemingly endless reserves of energy because he’s always moving. He doesn’t rest because he just got done coloring or because he just wants to sit down for a minute after a hard day. He rests because he has to. He’ll run fifteen laps around the playground, then come to me and say, “daddy, I’m tired, I need to take a break.” And he does. For about two minutes. Then he’s up and running for the slides again. In fact, I can hardly ever capture a decent picture of him because he is always in motion.

20141013_082555
He doesn’t even touch the *ground*.

 

He has an urgency to everything he does that I wish I could recreate. He does everything in his life like he knows it won’t last forever.

And we can too, if we let ourselves.

Momentum matters.

We come home and watch TV for hours because our momentum sucks. We drag ass and sleep in and laze around on the weekend because we feel like we need the rest to muster ourselves for another week at work. But that’s only true if we view the movement, the activity, the doing of things as an obstacle in our day.

But these things are not the obstacles in our day. They are the stuff of the day itself. They are the stuff of life. Your job. Playing with the kids. Going to the store. Cleaning the house. This is life. And if it wears us out, well, okay, maybe that’s what happens. But energy is transformative. The more you spend, the more you seem to have.

It’s why I feel like I can get more done on a day when I run than on a day when I don’t. It’s why I feel like I need to write for an hour after I push through grading a whole stack of papers. The days I feel like I can’t get anything done are the days where I just never got started and can’t break out of the funk of the negative momentum.

So, back to my son tapping on my forehead.

Six AM on a Saturday. I’d rather be sleeping. But I’m coming downstairs. Making him breakfast. Taking time out to write a little bit while he chases the cats around.

And now, I think I’m going to go chase him around the yard a little bit.

You know, fill up the tank a little.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Breaking Orbit

Pavowski10 Comments

This weird thing happens when you try something new. Exercising, or writing, or getting up earlier, or changing your diet.

First, the honeymoon. You make the decision and you feel fantastic about it: this is going to change me for the better! New year, new me! This time it’s for good! Maybe you go off the deep end: you hit Amazon and buy a bunch of new gadgets to make the change stick: new exercise equipment, a spangly doohickey for the kitchen, a fancy new word processor, new apps for your phone. And for the first few days, maybe even a week, it’s awesome. Difficult, but awesome. The change washes over you like a cool breeze in the dead of a Georgia summer.

But that’s fleeting. And the honeymoon passes quickly.

They days turn into weeks, and the body begins to resist the change, because the body is like electricity: it follows the path of least resistance. That least resistance means doing what you already know how to do, which is to say, not exercising, not writing, sleeping in late, eating the same old crap. Once the honeymoon is over, your body and mind pull a what is this shit?!?! and essentially revolt. Getting out of bed feels not only difficult, but demoralizing. Writing even a few words seems impossible. The sight of your workout clothes fills you with despair. If you even think about eating another salad, you might conduct your own personal holocaust in the produce section at the Kroger.

This is where most people fail. This is why New Year’s Resolutions collapse. It’s why people lose ten or fifteen pounds on their diets, then turn around and put twenty pounds back on. It’s why the internet is littered with the corpses of blogs that have maybe a dozen posts (I’m looking at you, accidentallyinspired.wordpress.com). It’s why you can always find workout equipment on craigslist and ebay for super-cheap. People make a change, but they can’t escape the gravity of the old way, and before you know it, their momentum peters out and they fall back to earth.

The funny thing, though? That point where gravity pulls you the hardest, where you feel you just can’t find the strength to stick to your plan? That’s the breaking point. When you can find the way to make it past that last stage, find the heart to stay with your plan for just a little bit longer, that’s when you can achieve escape velocity.

Space Shuttle, Liftoff, Atlantis, Rocket, Boosters

Because the thing about the momentum that’s keeping us to our old ways is: it cuts both ways. That moment we can embrace the positive momentum we’ve established and use it to catapult ourselves forward rather than allowing the negative momentum to pull us backwards is the moment where the change is no longer change; it’s a new normal.

Five years ago, I didn’t exercise, I was eating like crap, I hadn’t written anything in years. I went to work, I came home, I chilled with my wife, watched some TV, and that was life. These days, I feel antsy and horribly unproductive if I don’t write at least a little something every day. I get grouchy and irritable if I don’t go for a run. I get up at the crack of dawn basically every day (though I have my kids to thank for that). And … well, I still eat like crap. Nobody’s perfect, but we’ll keep trying anyway. But I still go to work. I still chill with my wife. I still watch some TV. But I get all of it done in the same twenty-four hours I’ve always had in every day. This is something I can’t really explain, and I’m not sure I want to look at it too closely. I fear that, like the mirage glimpsed out of the side of the eye, it’ll vanish if I try to focus on it.

I’m not an expert in psychology. I’m not a life-coach. But I know this: We are powerful. We can achieve great things, even if those things are only great in our tiny spheres of influence.

If only we have the heart to seize our potential and take control of our momentum.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Unpause

Pavowski6 Comments

*Coughs a little*

*Turns the lights back on*

Man, did I really let over a week pass without posting something around here? I don’t think that’s happened since I started the blarg almost two years ago.

Back then, a lapse like that would have scared the hell out of me. To be honest, it still scares the hell out of me, a little bit. Having started so many things in my life — running, writing, keeping a clean house, staying organized at work, keeping good financial records, NOT leaving evidence of my victims out in plain sight — only to have them grind to a halt a few days, weeks, months later when the initial push wears off, I know the importance of momentum. As a good friend of mine once told me (and I think it may have been a quote from somebody else, but I always attribute it to my friend Dorian), “the more you do, the more you can do.”

Writing 1000 words a day on the first draft of a novel only works if you’re doing it every day. If it’s just something you try to do when you have time, well, you’ll never have time. If going for a thirty-minute run is something you do when you have the energy, you will find yourself suddenly devoid of energy most of the time. If you clean the house only when it gets dirty as opposed to cleaning up little things as they happen, well, the sharknado gets overwhelming pretty fast, dunnit?

So to take a break of over a week from writing (anything, really, not just the daily-ish drivel I spew around here) sorta scares me. I’ve had the feeling more than once over the past week of “gee, I should really write something, just a quick little post about something the kids did, or maybe one more rant on the new Star Wars movie (both of those are coming, by the way).” But I let it slide, consciously so.

Partly to make sure I was spending the time with my family that they deserved. Partly to give my thoughts time to settle. (It’s been a good long while since I just kicked back and let my thoughts ferment a bit, and I’m feeling lots of ideas — for books, for stories, for the blarg — taking shape as a result). Partly, though, just for the break itself.

We work so hard in our day-to-day. Some harder than others, but everybody believes that they are working hard, and it’s true to some degree. Whether it’s the CEO working from dawn til dusk, the teacher taking home reams of papers to grade outside of work (HAHAHA not that that’s me, but those teachers exist), the stay-at-home mom who waits hand-and-foot upon the tiny humans she must teach to be good people… even the unemployed guy who hangs around and plays video games works hard in his own way. These things take stamina. These things tax the spirit.

I’m fortunate that I work in a profession with these built-in respites from the grind, that I get two weeks off for the holidays to spend time with family, to forget about work for a while, to recharge. Which is what it’s been all about for the last couple of weeks.

A big, giant pause button. Which I was glad to hit.

But I think, now, I’m even more glad to unpause and get back to work. I’ve got novels to edit. Short stories to draft. Other things to do stuff to.

Starting with cleaning these spiders out of the corners around here. Where is John Goodman when you need him?

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Strange Seasoning

Pavowski9 Comments

We’re coming into one of the strangest times of the year for the writer: the Holidays.

The dreaded Holidays bring with them a legitimate army of distractions, obstructions, and pitfalls for the writer. Between a total disruption of the work schedule, extra obligations to spend time with the family you aren’t seeing regularly, and oh yeah, let’s not forget, here in America there are at least two massive debilitating food comas on the horizon. Time to write is hard enough to come by when things are normal, but things are hardly normal at this time of year.

Which is why I find it particularly sadistic to put a writer’s torture device like NaNoWriMo smack in the middle of it… but that’s a rant for another day. (I’m not doing NaNo this year, nor do I have plans to ever do it. I have better things to do with my time than subject myself to the slings and arrows of attempting to write an entire half of a novel [50,000 words do not a novel make] in the least writer-friendly part of the year. Further, if you need NaNo to finally motivate you to write that novel you’ve been thinking about writing, then maybe — maybe! — writing isn’t your thing. But there I go digressing.)

On a writer’s website I frequent, an aspiring writer, who seemed in true distress, asked the question in a state of near hysteria: with meals to cook, shopping to do, family to visit, kids to take care of, etc… how do you find the time to write through this time?

Well.

I may be a hopeless optimist, and I may be a tireless (or tiresome, depending on your point of view) motivator — I really do make myself sick sometimes with all the rah-rah-rah and YOU CAN DO IT speeches around here — but one thing I’m also guilty of is a bit of a blunt streak. Okay, maybe less of a streak and more of a huge angry puckered blunt scar. I don’t like to mince words, and most of the time, a harsh dose of the truth is a lot more helpful. (This gets me in a lot of trouble with my wife and, well, people in general, but at 35, I am who I am.)

So I responded the only way I could think to: The same way you make time any other time of the year. Sure, you’ve got Holiday Things clamoring for your attention to the left and to the right, like a swarm of needy toddlers who have just learned that you will actually come running the moment they say “daddy”. And yeah, maybe you’re more obligated to devote time to these Things than usual. But the way you take time to write now is the same way you take time at any other point in the year.

You prioritize. You set values on the things that matter to you and you allocate time accordingly. Maybe this is the year where instead of waking up at 3 AM to go Black Friday shopping, you sleep in until 6 instead, and get up to write while the rest of the family is fighting for their lives in the mad crush of humanity trying to get to the Tickle Me Elmos of this year. Maybe instead of sitting around watching the Lions lose on Turkey Day (a favorite national pastime) you sneak off to jot down a few words. Maybe you don’t have to cook EVERY SINGLE DISH for your family’s dinner, and with the time you free up, you can escape to your study (or your car, or your bathroom, or your wherever) to get some words on the page. You might upset a few people when you bust up their traditions, but you’ll stay on target for your WIP.

Or maybe you multitask and pull double duty. Wake up even earlier to do your writing before the family wakes up, or stay up late to pound the page after they fall asleep. Keep the laptop on the kitchen counter while you’re cooking and season your draft while you season the mashed potatoes. Jot notes on characters and plot points in your favorite organizational writer’s app while you’re waiting in line to shop at 4 AM. Granted, you do this, and you’ll certainly have some consequences: sleep deprivation and overly salty mashed potatoes at the very least.

Or a lunatic altered personality that grins vacuously at a computer while stirring a bowl full of, apparently, WHOLE UNCUT VEGETABLES. Who could be that happy? Who could use a computer at all in the kitchen without destroying it immediately with splattered sauce and flying crumbs?

Or, and here’s the really crazy part where we entertain notions that maybe we don’t want to, you don’t.

It’s tempting to think that with the time off you could or even should get tons of extra work in on your writing. But you don’t have to.

This is not me telling you to make like Elsa and let your writing go over the holidays. Momentum matters, and you’re gonna be turkey-drunk enough to have plenty of trouble getting back in the rhythm when the world returns to normal. By all means, write when you can. But the world isn’t going to stop spinning, and your novel won’t collapse, and your writing hand won’t wither to an ashen husk if you take a little time off.

Writing can be something like a second job, and we need time off from any job if we want to not lose our minds.

And let’s be honest: during these strange days, we lose our minds enough to begin with.

LOOK AT ME ENDING NOT JUST A SENTENCE BUT A WHOLE BLARG POST WITH A PREPOSITION

ENGLISH TEACHERS DON’T CARE WHEE

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

A Plague of Excuses

Pavowski5 Comments

Usually I like to use the SOCS prompt to write about my writing process, but given that the prompt for the week is “four-letter words”, there’s only really one thing I can think about.

Plague.

No, wait. Disease.

No, sorry. Too fancy.

Sick.

We’re all sick. Everybody in my the house. Sprout the first is sniffling and snuffling and coughing his brains out. Sprout the second has a perpetual river of snot running down her face. Poor wife has been snagged by the grasping claws of the sore throat that I shook off a couple of days ago, and I’ve got the stuffy-headed feeling of a skull stuffed full of mucus. So, we’re all a little bit miserable.

And maybe that’s why this week seemed to stretch out for eternity, as my wife and I both agreed it did. In addition to the regular tribulations of the day, we had to come home to runny noses and coughing fits and the general bad humor of little kids suffering from sickness. Which is enough to take the wind out of anybody’s sails.

And as much as I like to find an inspirational or motivational spin to put on any hurdle to writing, it’s hard to think of much that’s positive to say about this one. There’s no positive to mopping snot off faces and having millions of germs coughed into your face holes by kids who haven’t got the motor control or consideration to even conceive of covering their mouths.

So writing on the project has been at a bare minimum this week. Posts here on the blarg have been next to non-existent. The plague going around the house has taken the mustard right out of my sails. And for all I write about powering through the crap days, writing even when you don’t feel like it, and embracing the work for its own sake for its therapeutic and uplifting properties, even I recognize that there are some days when that just isn’t the case. When you’re sick — really afflicted with something nasty, something physical or chemical that’s keeping you from firing on any of your cylinders, let alone all of them — the only thing to do is to hunker down, chug back a bottle of Nyquil or Pepto or whatever, and wait for the storm to pass.

Luckily, it feels like the storm might be breaking. I feel much better today than in the past couple of days, Sprout the Second’s face is not nearly so crusty this morning, and Sprout the First… well, he’s still coughing fit to serve as the percussion backbeat to a dubstep track.

Guess you can’t win ’em all.

Luckily, for that, they have Dayquil.