What I’m Doing, When I Should be Writing Another Book
Besides my day time job, transitioning out of the Marine Corps, trying to find a job, what are all the reasons I’m procrastinating on writing a new book?
To start, I firmly believe you can not be one dimensional, and as I seek to make myself balanced, I have taken up a lot of my own free time.
You can’t just be a meathead jock who eats weights on a steady three course meal. It’s fun, and there is a primal joy from picking something heavy up and putting it back down. Working out is a gift of mental health, it makes you able to do more, it keeps you physically healthy and out of the doctor's office. Working out. I love working out. I am not the most physically fit person I know, but my soon to be previous job did require that I at least appear to be physically fit. For the past three years, I’ve done workouts with college students hoping to become Marine Corps Officers, trying my best to make them tired. Throughout my career, I have switched between body weight exercises and weight lifting, though right now I am firmly entrenched in body weight exercises. I enjoy finding hard to reach milestones and pushing myself to achieve them. Currently I’m eyeing a clean one arm pullup, a set of 50 pullups, and a planche pushup. As of right now, June 6th, 2022, I lost my sloppy one arm pullup, hit 42 pullups the other day in one set, and I sure as hell can’t even do a straight arm planche yet. Working out has become the best way for me to reset my mind, to come up with new ideas for my book, to destress from work, and just to increase my ability to run around with my children. It’s nice to have the scheduled time for myself. No high like a runners high (That’s a lie, running is the coward’s exercise).
You can't just be a nerd who plays Dungeons and Dragons. I love nerd culture, I love investing my time and energy into creating a collaborative story with others. I play once a week, but I talk about it seven days a week. The ability to immerse yourself into another world, to take on the guise of a different person, it is surreal. However, I’m no actor, I don’t do an accent, and yet I still end up applying different facets of my own personality onto my characters. And, additionally, I get to play someone else. The stories weave are important to everyone at the table. We blend each of our own creative ideas with that of the Dungeon Master, and we accidentally tell compelling and real stories. Also, pretending to kill monsters is awesome, and if you don’t think so at this point, you are in the minority. Our modern day culture is suffused with nerdom, it’s because all those nerds from the 70s and 80s are running entertainment. I love it. Let the nerd train keep going until it crashes and burns in glorious fire, I’ll be aboard.
You can’t just be a dad and husband. I have two wonderful children, and I have a beautiful wife. I pulled my daughter in a wagon, we did that for twenty minutes in the backyard, for no reason other than she wanted to. I run errands for and with my wife. My son asks me to get in the pool, and I say, “Let me go get my swimsuit.” We spend every day with one another, all four of us. It’s a great time. I get to watch my children reach developmental milestones, watch my wife be the best mother, just the day to day, it’s comfortable. And that’s it, nothing profound, I love my family, we have a good time.
There are probably a few more things that I’m doing, like writing a blog post, but I don’t feel like diving into that. Instead what I’ll conclude with is this: I am so close to riding the tidal wave of creative inspiration. I can feel it building power behind the dam of life, I just don't know when that flood will happen. Luckily, I have still been writing. However, what I’m doing now is writing a blog post, with a toothpick in my mouth, thinking about my workout tomorrow, my Dungeons and Dragons game, my sleeping kids and my sleepy wife. One day, I’ll finish that other book, probably sooner rather than later.
It’s good for me to realize that while this tidal wave is slowly falling upon me, and as I wait for the inspiration to hit, I remember writing isn’t dropping everything and leaping. That’s dumb. There’s a delicate balance to everything I do, a precise calculation in time and effort. And in all of that, I make sure that I enjoy what it is I’m doing, otherwise what’s the point?
So, here’s to tomorrow, to some writing.
