Dueling Goals
Like twangy banjos, the goals that make up my hours, weeks and years of life compete against one another and make a lot of racket in my head.
Now that motherhood has entered the fray of personal and professional needs / wants, ranking the to-do list is less of a duel and more of a melee.
There are so many different ways to feel accomplished in the course of a day: cooking a healthy and delicious meal, reading an edifying novel, changing diapers, knitting up those balls of yarn that have been sitting on your shelf for years. It's incredibly easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, of larger priorities, in the face of all these tiny chattering goals.
For example, every year for the past several years I have joined the Reading Challenge on Goodreads. My goal is modest - 50 books a year, so I consistently make or exceed it. Last year I was quite chuffed to have made it because the challenge of having a baby and still managing to do ANYTHING else is not to be sneezed at. This year, I've only managed 33 of 50 and it's nearly November - as Goodreads cruelly takes pleasure in reminding me - I'm nearly 6 books behind my target.
This has thrown me into a tizzy; but why? Who on earth cares if I read 50 books or 30, or none, other than myself? Nobody is keeping tabs, I'm not receiving an award if I make my goal, there are no accolades to be won, I can't list it on my resume.
Yet here I am, frantically trying to squeeze in more reading time, instead of pursuing a more difficult but critical goal that would change how I feel about myself and alter the shape of my identity: WRITING something original.
It's appalling how many other false finish lines like this one I create for myself, all of which furnish me with a sense of hollow accomplishment if achieved, and a very real sense of panic if I find myself falling behind.
The worst part of these insignificant aims is that I use up so much of my limited store of planning power and patience on them: I can start knitting a sweater, carefully matching my pattern to the available yarn, selecting the right needles to get gauge, and forecasting that it will take me two months of completing 6 lines a day in order to get to the point where I can bind off and sew in the ends, then embark on the project and plod faithfully towards the finish line without incident.
None of these logical, sensible preparations get applied to the work of writing. There's no plan, no schedule. Instead of doing advance scouting of locations, taking copious photos and notes, preparing character sketches and outlining the 10-15 major scenes I need to address in my story, I proceed blindly, sitting down at my computer and just writing any scene that floats to the surface of my mind.
There is no rhyme or reason to it, no clear evidence as to where the section of dialogue or description will fit into the story arc, just scattered scenes that have broken free from the plot string and rolled off to settle in dark corners, unanchored. Not a necklace, just lost pearls.
Time to thin out my goals, be more discerning with my time, and stop spawning new story ideas every time moving forward on a novel starts to feel like actual work. Time to decide: is writing going to stay a hobby, or become a career?