Operation Achieve Anything: Day Seventy-Four, Dateline 3-15-2018
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“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul.”
Good afternoon Crickets!!! Welcome to day number seventy-four of Operation Achieve Anything. I’m publishing this post later in the day because I am attempting to try something new. Usually, I wake and the first thing I do is grab some food and head straight for my computer to work on my post like this where I share my assignments from the Achieve Anything… book.
As soon as I publish my post, I move right along and start to watch an episode of Saturday Night Live and then write my daily review to fulfill the needs of the Seeso Many Saturday Nights challenge where I plan to watch and review an episode a day until I get through the entire catalog of episodes. I then spend the rest of the day either working on other project or work on paid tasks to earn money.
The problem with the schedule is that since I’m currently living in my mom’s garage, every day, as soon as my nephew gets home from school he wants to hand out and watch his YouTube videos. Normally, if he comes into my room to play and I’m writing or done with my work there is absolutely no problem but when he gets home while I’m still watching the show, he’s too young to understand the concept of “come back later,” which usually results in a half-hour delay in my SNL viewing as I explain to the pouting child that I’m not mad at him and will be down to watch videos when I’m done.
This creates an unneeded level of stress to get things done before he returns because I don’t want him or my sister to think that I don’t want him to be out here. Yesterday, I woke up not in the mood to write right away so I decided to switch up the order of my routine and watch an episode of SNL while enjoying my breakfast. This ended up killing two birds with one stone. One, being that I finished my viewing far before the kid got home, and two, it felt like a nicer way to ease into the day.
It turns out that it’s much nicer to start the day being entertained over jumping right in and getting to work. Keep in mind, that I write summaries of the sketches as I watch so I’m not just vegging out like a couch potato plus the notes that I take help to get me warmed up instead of these Daily Breaker posts being the primer to my creative pump.
Not only do I see the above benefit but minus the dread of constantly having my SNL viewing get interrupted by the kid since I have no problem working on any other task while he’s in the room, I’m better set to live in the moment instead of rushing to get things done. This leads right into yesterdays assignment where I was supposed to practice being more present.
I hope this intro doesn’t make my nephew sound like a monster, it’s not a huge problem and it only affects my day every once in a while but being that I just started this new schedule and have already noticed that I’m more focused on the show as I watch it minus the potential distraction. In general, I really struggle with being present because I am constantly writing which means that I’m either reliving past experiences or looking to the future to find story inspiration.
In my non-writing life, I also struggle with this because even when I’m not behind my keyboard, I’m constantly thinking about new things to write as another layer to my efforts to avoid the mundane feelings I have toward my current place in the world. Then again, I truly feel like I’m in the moment when I’m writing, especially since I struggle to write more than a first draft instead of getting hung up on preplanning or thinking what I could fix in the future.
So, even though I didn’t change my schedule to fulfill yesterday’s assignment, I’m happy that it unintentionally led to an answer I was able to share. Now for today’s assignment, which is another annoying one in that it wants me to soul-search without any real defined task. The book points out that people struggle with these soul-searching assignments out of fear of what people will find, but I don’t like them because I live in my head and do this form of soul-searching all the time so I don’t feel challenged while also feeling nowhere closer to achieve any of my goals.
Oh well, we’ll see what new insights I come up with from this round of soul-searching when I check in tomorrow with my update for the day. Until then, it's now time to wrap this up by saying, 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.
