Operation Achieve Anything: Day Fifty-Seven, Dateline 2-26-2018
/
“You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him to a heavy load.”
Good morning Crickets. How are things going for you on this wonderful day where I’m about to share my insights from day number fifty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything. Just yesterday I was saying how I was excited for the Olympics to be over with so that I could get back to my regular schedule and already today, I’m back to my usual pre-Olympics waking time.
Now I just need for my birthday to hurry up and pass so I can stop feeling bad about myself for making it around the sun yet again without feeling all that confident in what the future has in store. If it wasn’t for the upcoming anniversary of my existence, I would feel perfectly fine with the steps that I’m making towards achieving my goals but having my special day, that doesn’t exist this year, lurking over my shoulder, I can’t help but think about my life as a whole where I feel nothing but loss and sorrow.
I get kind of the same way around New Year’s Day and have for most of my adult life. This may seem like a sad tradition that I should try to stop but on the positive side, the negative thoughts that lead up to these annual celebratory days that specifically focus on acknowledging the passing of time, I always come out of these dark days with a game plan in my efforts to make sure I’m at a better place by the time I get to next year’s celebratory time of year.
Right now, I have several things brewing in my head that I’m trying to work out that I plan to implement as soon as my birthday is over. I know that might sound like it’s going against the whole why put off tomorrow what you can start today, but the way I see it, I’m more taking advantage of these reflective days where I’m thinking about change, instead of just jumping into another project to avoid being accused of procrastinating.
Then again, I don’t know how many new tasks this book thinks I can do before spreading my efforts so thin that nothing gets the proper amount of attention that it needs. Sometimes I feel like my biggest issue is the constant battle between wanting to start something new or polishing an existing project in order to have more competed content to share.
My biggest flaw might be that my dream has always been to keep creating new content until I can consistently nail what I’m going for in the first draft. That’s not to say that I ever feel that I could get to the point where my first draft is perfect, but I do feel like I could/should be able to get a first draft where it just needs a little extra work to where in a perfect world, I could then hand it off to an editor to tidy while I move on to my next piece of work.
Having an editor that gets what I’m going for is the ultimate dream of mine because it would allow me the ability to spend way more time in the worlds that I make in my mind which plays into yesterday’s assignment about how I use my imagination. For yesterday’s cliffhanger, I pointed out that the Achieve Anything… book really dropped the ball by not having the lesson match the Mark Twain quote of, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
The book used this quote as a jump-off point for a lesson where these terrible things Twain was talking about were in reference to imagining worst-case-scenarios for an upcoming project or event. This overactive use of imagination then leads you to basically live out the terrible moments in your head when, in fact, it’s never clear whether or not these fears would ever come true. The book’s solution to this is to focus on the best-case-scenario instead, with the assignment being to start using my imagination to visualize a better future rather than focusing on my fears.
Though this is great advice and a fun thought-based assignment, as someone who writes a lot, I feel that what Twain was talking about wasn’t about our imaginations creating fearful predictions about any future unknowns, but instead was about how our imagination interpret events that actually happen to us with much of the terribleness stemming from the things that we make up in our heads.
This interpretation of the quote hit real close to home because I think it explains a bulk of both the pleasure and pain that I feel in my life. As I’ve said in the past, I come from a family of addicts and enablers which led to a lot of denial, suppressed feelings and psychological cover-ups to cope with the actions of the abusive drunks since they were still family and often the providers who we wanted to love.
As a kid, these coping techniques used by the elders led to a life filled with mystery. No one ever talked about their feeling, and to an outsider, it might genuinely look like everything was all good. In fact, I had no idea that things were bad when my parents got their divorce. Even to this day, I’ve never seen my mom and dad fight and I have yet to hear from either side what actually went wrong between the two of them.
Instead, I’ve had to piece together what happened using my imagination along with hints that I’ve picked up over the years. I think my upbringing where feelings were a mystery with negative emotions to be avoided at all costs is what actually piqued my interest in writing stories as a way to fill in the missing gaps.
The problem is that even when I tell a non-fiction tale, I’m often accurate when it comes to what went down and the order of events which makes me feel that I’m just as accurate when it comes to interpreting other’s thoughts and motives when that just might not be the case.
Then to add to the confusion, as most writers do, I use a lot of my life experiences in my writing, so, I’ll often fictionalize an event where I have full control over everybody’s thinking and motives which then solidifies in my mind that I wasn’t just right about what happened but I was also accurate in my understanding of why which might just not line up with all of the true thoughts and motives that were involve.
I also struggle with this in my current relationship with my mom, where she’s always been a bit absent-minded in that she always mixes up who told her or forgets things she doesn’t find to be important. This often leads me to feel that she just doesn’t care enough to listen to me in the first place which turns me into a bit of a grump when we talk.
To top it off, she falls into the enabler side of the family which means that every time I try to clear things up she acts like there is no problem at all in order to avoid being confrontational even when it might lead to a positive result. I inherited this nonconfrontational approach to life which is probably the key reason why I really connect to my interpretation of the lesson’s Mark Twain quote because I actually have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Again, I’m not fully sure if this fulfills my assignment but I’m happy with what I just shared. For today’s assignment, I’m supposed to look at my burdens with new eyes in order to see the potential opportunities they bring playing off of the new quote from Bear Bryant that can be found at the top of this post, assuming that a heavy workload is my burden, which just isn’t really the case.
As always, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see how I manage to fit this assignment in to work with my outlook on life. Until then, it’s now that time for my usual sign off where I say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
