Raven’s Range
Blather around a virtual range

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I don’t remember the last time I actually worked on my birthday. It was probably when I was a student, as I typically would take at least the day and often the week off. I’m pretty sure that this year is going to be no different. ;)

Last week we enjoyed a little trip to Brannan Island and Sandy Beach (less than 20 miles away and a whole different world). It took me roughly half the time to break out of the huge feeling of lassitude and even depression that followed me on the road, and to start enjoying myself.

I’d spent a particularly intense week prior to that writing and getting to know the social media sites, putting in some very long hours in front of a screen. The minute I stopped doing that I knew I’d hit the wall: I couldn’t face computers, reading, or even thinking during all that time away.

Usually everything’s a blog post waiting to be shared…but not this time. For the last week, I haven’t wanted to write. And that, for me, is bad.

Apparently, I don’t do well with being hooked into people and computers every waking minute. Somehow I’m still buying into that stupid Silicon Valley maxim of if you’re not working 16 hours a day you’re not working hard enough. It isn’t working for me, and yet it’s there, all the time, because we’ve been conned into thinking that this is the only way of “succeeding.”

If you’re not working 16 hours, then you should be filling all those extra hours with productivity. What form this productivity takes is up to you, but it should be useful. It should further you somehow.

Well, it doesn’t. What it does is burn me out. I’ve not been making the time to walk, read, log my own landmarks, or play. In fact, walking was one of the things I did most of while away in the countryside because I couldn’t handle anything cerebral at all.

So I have to ask: What’s the point in beating myself up like this? The point of work is to allow one to live, not the other way around. I don’t want to live the kind of toxic life that exhausts me and isn’t fun, and yet I have been. I don’t need to be famous or a millionaire or the one who dies with the most toys, winning. I just need my writing to be read and paid for enough that my family can eat, sleep, have fun and take care of medical needs and life oopsies.

I’ve already made huge strides in reducing costs so that I don’t have to earn as much. The next step will be to earn more in less time. And part of that, I think, will be to make myself have more fun until I don’t have to make myself any more. I need to give myself things to write about, for a start, and to let me stretch my mental and physical legs.

I’ve dropped the formal to-do list entirely. There’s a master wish-list and I scribble down maybe one or two things I need to do on the white board and they get crossed off when they’re done, but I don’t work from the big, panic-inducing wish list except when figuring out what’ll be most fun to do next.

For the last several days, instead of doing the things I “should” do, I’ve been doing the work equivalent of basket weaving, something I haven’t done for months: simple data entry at Markeroni. I’ve been letting my mind leach out all the poison and I’m starting to feel less burned out. In the spaces around this relatively mindless task, ideas and connections are growing that I had missed before. It allows me to see a bigger picture, to grasp what must be done in a non-threatening, non-overwhelming way.

Here’s an example: When I think of “brainstorming ideas for editors” I think of sitting down with Writer’s Market and some paper and drawing circles round words and connecting them with lines. Okay, that works, but there’s a different way. I can brew the ideas by letting them fill in the spaces around my mindless copying. The same kind of thing happens while out on walks, swimming, playing with my cats, or sitting outside watching the world go by.

So I think I’m going to start my personal new year in a better state of mind than if, say, I’d had my birthday a week ago. And after that, I’ll be ready to give the whole earning a living thing another go…only this time it might be from the cocoon of a folding chair set out in the sun, or from a coffee shop, or from halfway up a mountain.

You just never know.

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