The first day of a challenge, the first day of making a change in our lives is easy. When we take the first step on that journey we are highly motivated and excited. It’s an adventure even if it isn’t a huge change or challenge. We are feeling well and are well rested, in perfect condition to fiddle with and launch a new blog where we commit to writing a thousand words a day, if “we” were me yesterday anyway.
Day two can still be a wonderful day. We open a new page and let the fingers do their dance on the keyboard as we impatiently wait for what going to be written today. That’s the adventurous part of sitting safely at home in front of your computer, you never know what will end up on that virtual paper in front of you. It can be a thrilling story, a wonderful memory or an epiphany to help you solve a problem you’ve been dealing with for a while. Anything can happen.
Or you can meet the obstacles that will arrive to question your commitment to the challenge. Whether is because there’s so many other things you need to do and you just don’t feel like you’ve got the time or maybe you’re not feeling well and you just want to rest, spending time staring at a computer screen is not exactly what you feel like doing, maybe you didn’t get much sleep and is super tired. Sad? Mad? All of the above? Taking a day off is okay and not necessarily a failure, that’s up to you to decide. Need a break? Take a break and come back later.
I mentioned sleep… I have heard of it and I was thinking about trying it one of these days. Or nights might be better. Too often I find that it’s six am and I haven’t even tried to sleep yet mainly because I live on the wrong side of the world. The majority of my friends live on the other side of the water puddle where my six am is only midnight. Sometimes my friends stay up late, until one or even two am making it eight over here. The sun has been up for hours making it’s way around the house and soon it will shine straight into my room at my bed making it a sauna to sleep in. Since heat normally isn’t a problem I have no ac or fan to cool down. It’s not a common thing in our cooler colder climate zone. I have my window open in hope of some cool breeze from outside. I live close to the ocean so there’s usually at least a little bit of wind. Except on the hottest days, of course.
Sleeping in a sauna is not really such a good idea. I wake up with a migraine that wants me dead. Lights hurt my eyes and I need to cover the window to block the sunlight, unfortunately trapping any chance of cool air on the other side of the curtains. The determination to get up and sit by the computer screen typing one thousand words is in serious danger.
So it’s eight am and I haven’t slept at all. The sun is up and it’s a wonderful day. If that isn’t enough to keep me from sleeping, I have neighbors. After sleeping all through the night they wake up and come out on their patios, terraces or whatever you want to call that small area underneath the balconies where they sit and enjoy their morning coffee, talking to each other across the fences between the gardens. The kids are out playing with their soccer balls, kicking it against the wall creating loud bangs that echo in my house and in my head. Babies are crying, dogs are barking. An ordinary sunny, summer Sunday. The sun shining from a clear blue sky, our colors. I wish it would rain. It would be cooler and no one would be outside and I could sleep. I might owe a lot of people an apology. It has been raining a lot this summer. Might be my fault.
To escape from noise I listen to music on YouTube, hour-long versions of songs like Hanging tree from Hunger games, music from the Hobbit or the Heist by Macklemore. To fall asleep at all, or I think it’s more like passing out because of exhaustion than falling asleep, I watch movies. I have been sleeping to the Star Wars for some time now. It takes a long time to get through all six movies when you fall asleep half way through all the time. Last night I tried to sleep while watching the Hobbit but there weren’t enough explosions, I think. Anyway, it didn’t work that well.
Music is also a necessary to help me writing. The only exceptions is when the rain is pounding on the plastic roof above the balcony outside my bedroom or when the birds greet the morning with their early morning serenades that echo so loudly in the quiet before us humans wake up. I love listening to the birds in the mornings. It’s an amazing time of the day when the sun is rising and the new day begins. For the longest time nothing but birds, then the distant sounds of cars out on the main road. You can hear how the world wakes up and it’s nothing like it. It reminds me of the Stephen King movie the Langoliers, where you can travel in time and land in a moment that hasn’t been yet and see how time catches up and everything comes alive. That’s a spoiler, sorry.
Maybe I should warn anybody who reads this that I don’t do much editing. I write it as it comes to me and then I hit the publish. The only editing is what I do as I write, the struggle of finding the right words or trying to make a sentence make sense. I realize I probably fail a lot of times and I might have found those mistakes had I read it through at least once before publishing like I would a regular blog post, but that’ not the way I do my challenge. Or it hasn’t been so far. That might have to change. But not this time.
I have reached and passed the goal of one thousand. So I will end this post here and continue tomorrow.
If you made it this far….
Many thanks and I wish you a wonderful day!!!
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