If you are lucky enough to experience beauty, awe or wonder in this world, make sure you stop to appreciate it, because you never know when you'll have the chance to see it's like again.
I think such things invigorate the soul and and serve as a reminder that life is something to be treasured. How this thought pops into my head is my annoyance over my own lack of drive of the past few months, when it comes to writing. I have, true to my nature, procrastinated in my efforts to get back into the flow of things. There's always tomorrow, there's always that week off, there's always the weekend. Nothing much has happened recently, nothing to talk about, I have to focus on this, or that. I was sitting on the couch, laptop on my lap, straining to think what I could write about. I knew I wanted to vent my irritation at my own failings, but after all this time, I felt deadened and unable to put words onto the blank page. So I looked around for inspiration and suddenly realised that our living room had been transformed by the magic of the setting sun. What better way to start than by briefly describing what had so struck me at that very moment?
And as I typed, disliked what I'd typed, deleted, re-typed and re-read I glanced back to my inspiration for a fresh view, only to discover it had already vanished. How sad! The living room, as pretty as adorable wife makes it, was lacking the visual impact the shifting Earth created by directing the sunlight at the right angle into our modest little room.
How silly then, that I put off writing something, held myself back from putting these little symbols onto a white screen, in a effort to describe something, for any reason. What good reason could there be for not taking the opportunity to look around me and see what wonders were right in front of me at that very moment?
But it's what happens. I do suffer from an insecurity, probably not uncommon, that means when I'm not writing I can't imagine how I wrote the last thing. I even read back something I created and wonder where it all came from. I read portions of my book and can't envisage how I got all those words there! Yet when I'm back here, as I am now, typing away, it seems perfectly natural and normal to be doing so.
My fear now is I shall make some promise, to write lots, to achieve lots and then I'll lapse back into that old habit of putting it all off until another day. So to avoid that I will make no such promise. I will just try to be as I was before, when I managed a certain routine. After all I DID write a whole novel. I DID write this very blog on a regular basis. I DID manage to write my blog novel at the same time and I managed this for quite some time. So it's no hardship to suggest I could do this again.
If nothing else, I owe it to myself to try and do more to self-promote my novel. Why take all that time and effort to get to the end and even manage to self-publish if I now don't make the final push to get it into peoples hands? What a waste of that world I created. It would be a betrayal of my characters, whom I fell in love with and who have more life to live and more adventures to have.
I guess it's true of us all that we are our own worst enemy. Our failures, foibles and mistakes are all of our own making. But the thing I have to remember is just like the beauty of nature, opportunities are fleeting and for every day I don't step forward with my own creations, is another possible opportunity lost for all time.
