Well today has been a real test for my focus and progress. I’ve had good news and bad which has distracted me in ways that I found difficult to navigate. Life demanded my attention and time just when I had committed to getting down to some writing. The decision to write today was difficult because yesterday gave me a preview of the day I had today in some respects, I was already distracted, then more happened. Writing about real world obstacles here is unavoidable if I am to authentically document my creative process, because the real world can and does get in the way of anything and everything, not only the task of writing.

I had to take a different approach to my process without the luxury of a block of time. For an hour early in the day I wrote around a piece written a while ago anchoring it into the sea of words that I am accumulating. Then life happened. Later I returned to copy and paste sections into place to edit in when my focus was better, continuing from there tomorrow is the plan.

What I did complete was worth the effort, I did enough work to make progress. It’s the attention to my work that’s bothering me. I didn’t feel present, I didn’t give the best of me, my head and my heart were elsewhere. This is the learning for me in all of this – how to find balance and how to apply structure to my process. I have done that somewhat so I should feel good about it, but I find myself sighing a lot, that ‘want it, but can’t have it’ sigh of the unattainable.

One conclusion that I have made from the past couple of days is that navigating two worlds, between my writing and the everyday, will continue to bring up this problem of distraction despite my best efforts and planning. It’s not so much that my time was taken up, that’s part of life, I’m bothered by the fact that I lost my rhythm for the flow. The rush has dimmed and I want it back, but I have to get real and accept that with balance and structure it will return as surely as it will leave again at points in the future.