It’s taken a while but I have finally completed an actual, publishable piece of work.
The humdrum of retail has been getting me down a bit lately. Turn up, do your thing and go home not really inspired or that you have done anything close to “saving the world”. But alas, I get home tired and not ready to tackle the monotony of regular life involving cooking and cleaning and maintaining the lifestyle of a teenage daughter. I’m sure my wife feels the same, albeit she feels more enthused about what she does in her career, kicking goals and setting the bar. She too shows the trauma of having to deal with people (and I mean colleagues here) who are clearly on a lower intelligence gauge or couldn’t organise piss-up at a brewery to save themselves. Yet my beloved finds a way to work through her goals and come up with ways to make things happen. I think she does way too much, but she will never admit it. Especially to me.
Having an extra-curricular focus is difficult in this modern world of ours. We try many things such as basketball, going for a run, a gym session or catching up with friends. Not having the energy to get up off the couch after a long day is tedious exercise. For me, I fall into the trap of waiting for motivation to come and slap me over the face. There are so many things I would love to be doing, but after a long day, nothing comes to me like sitting on the couch, watching my favorite show or jumping online to “snack-game” on my ipad. Easy fixes for my boredom. Quick shots of dopamine that I know are great now, but later on, I begin to get the guilts and mull in my own disappointment of not seizing the day or some crap like that.
It was in the act of doom-scrolling on my phone that I stumbled upon a reel from a science guy who specialises in the study of how brains work (that’s how highbrow I think of myself as!) He explained that the reason for the lack of motivation has nothing to do with your ability, or inability for that matter to set long term goals and stick to them. It is in fact closer to say that I have trained my brain to accept bordom as the norm. Something that can be easily fixed by a quick episode on Netflix rather than spending the same time at the gym as it requires less energy. This is a primal thing for us. Early in our evolution, this was a great function for our brain. Whatever could meet our goals for survival quickly got us through, Nowadays, it means setting long term goals are more difficult because they require more energy. This is something the brain is hard-wired to circumvent if there is an easier option. The trick is to experience more boredom and the science guy assures us that motivation begins to return. With this, I thought, “what the heck!” I’ll give it a go and see what happens. I mean, afterall, it couldn’t hurt… right?
As the guy mentioned also, at first it will be uncomfortable but for me, it didn’t take long at all. I’m talking less than half a day for me to start punching the keyboard again. I ignored my games, alternated away from watching shows or movies on my day off and the juices began to flow. It then became a case of what do I write, or more importantly, what could I finish?
It happened to be a short story I had first begun writing back in 2017, when I had a serious bout of the H1N1 bird flu that was doing the rounds at the time. Being stuck in bed for weeks coughing up copius amounts of green stuff and no sleep through constant wheezing, I started hitting out a story about a character by the name of Alex. He was travelling across the western states of the U.S.A to see his daughter Jesse perform the cello in front of a large audience. I won’t go into much more detail as the story is now finished some six and a half years later and I am preparing it for competitions to see how it goes. Once that cycle is complete, I will look into online publishing and see where that takes me.
Of all the things that could have motivated me to write again and chase the dream of recognition and relevance, it was a random video on Instagram, the very vehicle for my distraction that sent me forward. Not the memory of my Dad and his long fight with renal failure and prostate cancer. Not my sister and her journey with breast cancer. Not my close frind Kate, who has and is battling cancer would do it for me. But, some bloke who studies brains helped me to see what we all know but don’t realise until it is happening to them. Motivation will not come to you if you don’t remove the obsticles of instant gratification first. Then, and only then (for me at least) can I start or resume a journey that has a long term goal.
I hope this blog hasn’t been too long, and distracted you from doing what you want to do. Feel free to return to your Reels now. At least you have a way out now, if you follow my lead.
Mw.
mawallbank.com 