Oh Me of Little Faith...

Twenty-seven days ago, I didn't think I had a prayer.  Today, I've got a lot more than that; I've got a 50,000+ start to a pretty good tale (which admittedly needs one heck of a lot of revision), a certificate, and one hell of a sense of accomplishment.  Against all odds...starting three days late and putting weekends and holidays strictly off limits...I beat NaNo. On time, even.  I validated my work at 50,493 words at ll:45pm on November 30th...with a whopping 15 minutes to spare.

You know...I wonder how many other things I could accomplish in my life if I pushed myself even a little bit in that direction?

NaNoWriMo

It's official:  I've lost my mind.  Don't know what in the hell possessed me to think that I could actually do this, but I've let my online friends talk me into doing NaNo this month....three days after it's started.

For those who aren't familiar...and unless you're a writer, you aren't....National Novel Writing Month...or NaNoWriMo, as it's more informally called, is one of the largest events of the year.  Each November, writers gear up to partake in 'Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon'.  Basically, this means beginning at 12:01am November 1st, you have thirty days in which to write a 50,000 word novel.  This work must be uploaded and validated on their website no later than 11:59pm on November 30th, in order for you to win.

What's the prize, you ask? Personal satisfaction, and bragging rights.  I'll never make it. But I'm committed now, and I'm sure gonna try!

Excuses, excuses...

You know, it's pretty sad that by all appearances, it's been over a year since I've blogged, when actually it hasn't been that long.  When we bought the property a year ago, our lives sped up so fast that I had a hard time keeping up with the blog, so I started documenting everything with pics, telling myself that as soon as life slowed down a hair, I'd do a post and back-date it.  Well...that lasted a while, but over time, it got farther and farther between posts, because I felt this insane drive to 'catch up' before I could move forward.  In actuality, I could have been posting current stuff all along, and just filled in the blanks as I had the time.

Today, I got to thinking....how many other things in my life am I treating in the same manner?

• The spring cleaning of the garage that couldn't be done as THOROUGHLY as I felt like it needed, therefore never got done at all.
• The 'get healthy' kick that has never quite materialized because I felt like it had to be a 'do or die' thing.
• The phone call I've been putting off forEVER, because I let it go too long to begin with.

In actuality, the garage could have been tackled in bits and pieces and been ....maybe not sterile, but certainly clean and orderly by now.  Any inroad toward better health would be better than none,  and had I made that call MONTHS ago, I could have hung my head in shame for five minutes and let it go.  At this stage of the game, it might very well have cost a dear friendship.

Why, why, why do we do this to ourselves?  Why, when it's so easy to tackle things in tiny bite-sized pieces instead of feeling as though we have to conquer Mt. Everest?  Is it a fear of not achieving perfection?  Or simply procrastination that drives us to put things off so long? 

I don't know.  Greater minds than mine will need to debate that, and most likely already have.  I know I'm not the only person in the world who battles this demon.  I just want it to end.  I need the insanity to stop, because it affects every single aspect of my life. 

So.....today, I will work on what I can work on today, accomplish as much as I can today, be happy with whatever I manage to achieve....and let tomorrow go hang itself.