Tricking Myself Into a Life.
I sit down each night now to write. Fifty words, that's the deal I made with myself, and I want to tell you why fifty words instead of the two thousand I actually want to write, because the answer to that question is the whole point of this post.
I live cabin style, in the woods. In a place that feels made for writing books, poetry, songs, or whatever else might emerge when life becomes quiet enough to hear yourself think. I have that opportunity out here. I've known it for a while.
And for a while I have squandered it.
I have allowed the world's noise, the latest strategic move in some political theater thousands of miles away, to take hours that could have belonged to my own life. Independent journalism has become a splinter in my mind. It's easy to convince myself that staying informed is important, and it is, but there comes a point when consuming what is happening in the world becomes a powerful distraction from actually experiencing and creating within my own life.
My art so far has been the land and the home I'm cultivating here. That's its own story, for another time. This one is about the writing. The notebooks, the scratch paper, the dictaphone full of creative ideas I never went back to. All of it scattered. All evidence that I have been writing, but without a real system for turning that writing into something.
The Trick
I've committed to things before. Two hundred words a night. A full blog post, two thousand words, by the end of the day. And when the night arrived and the will didn't, I said the most dangerous sentence I know:
I'll do it tomorrow.
It has the same shape as a New Year's resolution. I'll start January 1st. It's a promise that feels responsible in the moment because technically you haven't given up. You've simply moved the commitment to another day.
I know this sentence intimately.
It's the same one that took my gym membership money for years while I found reasons not to go. No system, no hack, just hope wearing the costume of a plan.
So this time, influenced by James Clear's emphasis on creating systems rather than simply chasing goals, I picked fifty words.
Absurdly small.
Small enough that I'll do it tomorrow has nowhere to hide, because there's no reasonable excuse for not writing fifty words tonight. Two accountability partners are in it with me. And it's working, in the sense that I'm actually doing it.
The voice is still there.
I'll get up in fifteen minutes.
I'll start at eleven.
What's fifteen more minutes?
But I'm learning not to listen to it.
What's Fifteen More Minutes?
This is where I am realizing that the experiment isn't really about writing.
It's about the habit of postponing my own life.
I will get up in fifteen minutes. I will start at eleven. I will make the call tomorrow. I will write tomorrow. What's another fifteen minutes?
Fifteen minutes isn't much. But neither are fifty words.
That's the point.
Small choices accumulate in both directions. I can repeatedly choose comfort and tomorrow, or I can begin practicing being the person who moves now.
I could belittle fifty words because it seems insignificant. Instead, I prefer to treat each night I sit down and write as evidence of the life I am trying to create.
Fifty words. That's the deal.
