In the interest of self-preservation, I’m going to keep tonight’s entry short. Tonight my mind is empty. It is tired. It is a machine that is running on fumes.
There’s a physical feeling to writing that has nothing to do with my fingers on the keyboard or my hand around a pen. Writing is a series of decisions. And in my mind, I can feel each of those decision points. They are impasses in front of me. On good days, they are only hurdles, and I am an Olympic runner. On other days, they are walls, and I need to throw a rope over and scale each one. Tonight they are only hurdles, but instead of leaping over each one, I see myself crawling on the track, clawing the ground in front of me trying to gain an inch. It’s not that the decisions are particularly difficult, it’s that I am too tired to make them.
I’ve come up with a number of ideas for tonight’s post as I’ve sat here. But each one sputters out as quickly as it came. After I write the first sentence, my mind comes to a hurdle, and it promptly walks around by proposing a new idea. Then the process repeats itself. Tonight I can’t make it over the hurdles. So I’m going to take my batch of new ideas, and save them for another time.
Sometimes, the most important thing to do is to give yourself a break.