Here I am with a list of tasks for each of my jobs, my writing life, my personal life, and my family life. Almost all of them involve sitting down in front of a computer and hunkering down with my responsibilities. Lately I have been finding it nearly impossible to focus, and so I work in 5-15 minute increments. Those little spans have been, I believe, damaging to my brain. I blame no one and nothing but myself, and it is sending me into a panic. So now I am trying to relearn focus. First, I am training for a marathon. For me, running is nothing but an endurance test, a true challenge of the mind, more so than any of my intellectual or artistic endeavors. One foot in front of the other, with no praise or authority figure telling me to move forward. Just me and my focus. The marathon even recommends running without music, and so I suppose that in October I will be truly alone with my thoughts for several hours at a time. It's frightening but vital to my writing life, I believe.
Secondly, the kittens. I mentioned in my last post that I was aiming to catch and socialize some feral cats on the Mark Twain House property. At this moment in time, I have caught two, and hope to catch the remaining three as soon as possible. I realized the other day that I have spent an incredible amount of hours sitting there in the bushes staring at cats. Now that my brain is so focused on them, I am regaining the urge to write.
The things that made me want to write the most are the things that are furthest from writing: being outside, in the world, not thinking. Now I'm off to practice the long gaze.