Stick to your habits

Aren’t habits fascinating things?

My habit is to write my blog on a Sunday morning, pretty much my first task of the day. This weekend, though, I’ve been away (on a retreat as it happens) and, as a result, wasn’t in a position to write my blog on Sunday morning.

Now, on Monday morning, when I have the chance to sit down and write again, I really don’t feel like it. You might as well skip it for this week that little voice in my head is saying. What are you going to say, anyway? 

That got me thinking about how that same feeling can perpetuate into working on Age of Oppression (or any other form of writing) which I’m editing at the moment. If I get out of the regular routine, it is very easy to tell myself that, since I have missed the original intention, I may as well not bother.

Sound at all familiar? Of course – we all do it! But if you allow it to happen with your writing, a day becomes two or three or a week or a month or a year…. With, all the time, a part of you thinking I really ought…and another part of you thinking It’s been so long now, why not watch a movie instead? 

What a little tinker that inner voice can be!!!

That’s why it is so important to have routines and to stick to them and, if a routine is broken, to get back to it as fast as possible. Otherwise that best-selling novel or Pulitzer prize-winning article you are working on is going to sit on a shelf gathering dust while you wait for inspiration to strike.

So, despite it feeling strange and out of the ordinary; despite the strong desire to curl up with a good book instead; despite feeling that I might as well leave my blog for another week; here I am, on a Monday morning, writing my blog.

See you next Sunday!