Discipline and Routine

Waugh. Updating is hard, because the brain is so full and distracted, and the body is so tired all the time now. I keep promising myself to at least note down little tidbits, but the resolve never seems to make it out of my brain during those optimistic, relatively wakeful early morning hours onto the computer screen later in the day, when I'm deep into distraction and fatigue and everything else seems preferable to blogging. When did I lose the compulsion to blog every day? I don't know. Probably the same time I lost my push to keep moving forward with the novel. I feel like an athlete who's seriously out of training--which reminds me, I haven't been to yoga class for about a month either. Connection? Why yes, thanks, I'll have several. Sigh.

Discipline. Routine. It's funny to me now, but these used to be vaguely icky concepts to me, back when I fancied myself a freewheeling, young-and-open, Aquarian, rebellious bohemian type (and yes, before I became a parent. Thanks for asking.). Despite having grown up immersed (and wildly successful, and therefore co-opted) in an academic system that stressed just exactly these values above all else, the concept of willfully, purposefully submitting to a regular discipline of anything seemed not only wrong, but in some way weak to me. As in, "only the weak, the small, the not-very-clever ones need routines to follow, and so must submit themselves to a discipline. Greatness does what it wants when it wants to, consequences be damned. You can't force the muse. You don't have to follow the rules that society sets out, just because everyone else does." And while this rebellious, anarchic sort of outlook is not altogether wrong (and was and continues to be very helpful to me at times), I have finally come to realize that I can't live there either. (I'm not saying others can't--more power to ya, let me know how it goes for you when you're 35.)

Now, I'm not saying that I find myself so enamored of discipline and routine that I want to join a cult (or the military) or take up some sort of monkish existence where these are the highest/only organizing principles of life. Neither unthinking order or extreme chaos are good places to live. As with so much else, I argue for living in the gray area between extremes, drawing lessons from both and applying them on the fly, wherever necessary and in whatever way works for each of us (with the important caveat of also always trying not to hurt others). What I *am* saying is that hey, athletes and artists and monks are on to something. Regularity, practice, discipline, training, routine--these things help the mind and the body to reach a higher level of proficiency.

And just to close the circle on this rambly entry that wound up going somewhere I really didn't expect when I started out complaining about not regularly posting, I think my point here is that I need to reprioritize (again), and get back in creative training. Distractions be damned--I don't care if it's the holidays or that my body is busily betraying me while making a new human being, it's time to go back to the regular writing (not to mention the yoga). I know I'll feel better as a result.