The Best of Intentions

I’ve always enjoyed writing and frequently threatened to commit my thoughts, opinions and musings to posterity for others to consider. So, when I started this blog, it was my intention to write daily, posting something every other day or so. I thought it would give me opportunity to reflect upon and express what was important to me; hence, the title Ruminations.

So much for the best of intentions. I haven’t written now in nearly a month. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write. There have been a lot of things worth reflecting upon, I just haven’t done it. Life has a habit of getting in the way. It isn’t that something special has kept me from writing. It has been the ordinariness of life that interfered. All the usual things that occupy our time: work, family, chores, and the tedium of daily existence.

So I just haven’t taken the time to write. Time is the critical variable. Time has become much more important to me as I approach 60. Time seems in shorter supply – a distorted perception perhaps, but a felt truth – and I tend to guard it jealously. There are a lot of things I think are worthwhile doing – I just don’t want to spend my time doing them.

We don’t always have a choice. There are things we must do. Yet the truth is I also waste a lot of time. I watch – obsessively – politics and news on cable TV, hours of the same re-processed bullshit that neither informs nor illuminates. I read articles in newspapers and magazines that are only of marginal and very passing interest to me, simply out of habit. I consume formulaic mysteries that entertain me but whose titles and authors I often don’t know even while reading them and whose plots, content, themes and conflict are lost immediately upon turning the last page. I read and forward essentially useless emails and surf the web in random pursuit of momentary amusement.

I know this so why do I do it? Ease and laziness, I suspect. It is easier to be entertained than it is to think. Clicking the mouse or the remote is just a hell of a lot easier than sitting in front of a blank screen thinking and writing about something that matters. Trying to find the right words to express a thought is just a hell of a lot harder than letting some talking head amuse or piss me off. For someone who has been accused of being a workaholic, I also tend to be lazy. It’s not that I don’t like to work and accomplish. I do but I also lack discipline. And I think if you are going to blog, discipline is a must. You have to make yourself sit at the computer and write. That means you have to make yourself think about something worth writing about, even if you are writing mainly for yourself, as I am.

I suspect discipline becomes more important the older you get. There is less energy and in a real sense less time, so using both energy and time wisely is crucial. In part that discipline means jettisoning those things that while important or interesting, aren’t important or interesting enough to justify the expenditure in time and energy they consume. Jimmy Breslin, the great New York writer, used to write a funny column at the beginning of every year listing the people he wasn’t going to talk to that year because they weren’t worth his time. I think I need to make a similar list of the things I’m not going to do. I will probably still do some of those things, but not all of them, thus saving time. If this blog is to be ongoing, I will also have to get behind myself and push a bit, perhaps by committing to the modest discipline of writing every day for 15 minutes. Lazy as I am, I can probably make myself do that, at least most days.

That is my intention. We’ll see.