I got up early today to write.
I am trying to make writing a bigger part of my life by carving out pieces of time for myself when no one is around. Because my life is what it is right now, that means I can write either early in the morning when no one is up or late at night when everyone has already gone to bed already. Either way, I have to sacrifice sleep in order to make the time.
I am not complaining nor do I wish something was different in my life but I am sharing this to illustrate how time can be managed by being very conscious of how you are prioritizing in order to accomplish the modest goals that you may have. It does not always work.
Take, for instance, this morning. I set my alarm to 5:15 a.m. and pressed snooze twice. Eventually, I crawled out of bed and made coffee because I forgot to set the timer on the coffeepot last night.
Then I attempted to go back to sleep on the couch but my allergies have been bad so I got back up and had breakfast and an allergy pill. After breakfast, I pulled out my laptop and enthusiastically opened up a blank Microsoft Word document and stared at the white page for a while before opening up Facebook and scrolling through snippets of other people's lives and interests.
Somehow I ended up clicking a video link and started watching TED talks from marine biologists who found the giant squid a few years back. Then I starting watching all of the videos about giant squid I could find until I remembered that I was supposed to be writing.
So I shift-tabbed back to my blank document and started to write, all the while thinking about how much I like giant squid and isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where squid larger than two story houses exist? While sipping coffee out of my geek-chic Dr. Who mug, I pondered other creatures that are both repulsive and extraordinary in our lives and I remember that last night we watched a bat circling in the twilight right outside our window. It looked like it was on a bug-eating merry-go-round fifty feet in the air. We were able to watch it swoop and circle until it was too dark to see and I felt like cheering it on, thinking about how many mosquitos it was currently eating and I hoped that it came back tonight to finish the job. So I wrote this down and hoped that someone else would find it interesting.
Eventually my daughter, another early riser, stumbled out of bed with her party wagon hair and sleepy eyes to tell me all about her dreams from the night before and about the ouchie she forgot to tell me about yesterday. I made her breakfast and we sat at the table together while the day got brighter and the house began to wake up.
Ready to do it all over again.
