Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Cracking the Habit, at least a little.

Once you do something for a while it begins to become routine. A habit, if you will. Every morning my mom stumbles into the kitchen in search of the coffee pot. Every afternoon my brother comes home for school and heads straight for the tv. These are big habits that over time are formed. They pile up to create our daily routine. Trying to change that routine can be tough sometimes - breaking a habit is always hard - but it can be very worth it.

Every morning, I get up at eight, whether my alarm clock has told me to or not. First thing I do? Grab the computer. Check email, instant messages, face book, the blog. It's a whole routine, one website after another. Recently my house lost internet. It's been over three weeks, now, that I haven't been able to go for my computer first thing to check email and face book. But on the other hand, it's given me extra time every morning to focus on what I should be doing! Writing.

Yesterday, I was going through my notebooks. See, like I said before, I'm a really messy person in general (except my work spaces) so as part of a new year's resolution I started a step by step program that creates habits to help a person keep their home clean and organized without stressing. It's been interesting so far. The first thing that is recommended of beginners to the program is to get a notebook, to keep track of your progress and whatnot. So anyway, to do this, I was looking through my notebooks, trying to find once that was at least semi empty. Believe it or not, I have about a hundred notebooks of all sizes and colors, and not a single one of them was less than half filled. It was very frustrating…

Well, while looking through all of that mess, I stumbled (literally) over a notebook that I'd forgotten I still had. It happened to be one I used in college and it held some very detailed outlines of the original plot of Conflict. Everything I could imagine was in that notebook, from shorthand timelines to specific quotes and entire paragraphs of things that were supposed to happen! It was quite the find. I can't begin to describe how helpful it was to have that. And to think, if I'd never been without internet I'd never have been looking through those notebooks in the first place. I would have been on FaceBook!

Not to say that having internet is bad. In fact, I'm thanking the heavens and lucky stars and all that is good since we should be getting our brand new internet up and running this week. Sometimes, though, it's really good to break out of your routine and do something else, at least once. =) If nothing else, you may trip over something you thought you'd lost. Wouldn't that just make your day?

So, until we meet again. Ta-ta!

No comments:

Post a Comment