Procrastination, Paralysis and Stagnation; on getting stuck in a rut
In three weeks time, The Boy will be a year old, which is - frankly - bonkers. In that time, I have taken literally hundreds of pictures of him, lovingly curated into a growing set of Arthur, Daily books; got just-under-halfway through a stalled alphabet project; and posted here only twice (neither time in 2014). I have been on courses to learn how to cure and smoke food, brew beer, and butcher meat and done very little with any of the knowledge I gleaned, apart from make myself feel bad about that fact.
Maybe it’s just the constant tiredness that comes with a small child, but but idly browsing websites reading about doing things has subsumed the actual doing of them. Leafing through Kickstarter projects for new camera straps has replaced actually doing anything with any of the stack of unprocessed memory cards sitting on my desk, and buying a new pen to capture tasks has apparently become a serviceable substitute for doing them.
Worst, I spend what time I do have stuck in a loop of distraction. I won’t watch a film or read a book, because that’s committing that chunk of time. Far better to fritter away the same amount of time, longer, under the illusion that I’ll go and do something less boring instead as soon as I finish looking at these t-shirts.
So today I’m declaring bankruptcy. I’m abandoning the guilt of the unfinished A-Z projects, unopened Kickstarter rewards and the unread items in my RSS feeds. I’m going to stop berating myself about the not-doing, and just do, in the hope that somewhere a rhythm will find itself and I’ll be making stuff again. But I do need structure, so I’m going to set myself a really low, uncomplicated bar. Every week, from this week, I’ll post something here. It might be a photo, some kind of kitcheny experiment or something else. I will try and make it interesting. It will very likely be imperfect, if not horribly, dreadfully flawed. But it’ll be something that didn’t exist before I touched it.