Putting Out the Flames
If you're like me, you write a list for everything. There are hundreds of scraps of paper strewn about my life containing checklists from household chores, to personal goals. Paper lists, typed lists, scrolls of endless “to do’s” float around in my brain on a daily basis. My big conundrum? How do I know what's most important? What should I cross off first? If I were to leave this world today, what would I be proud that I’d accomplished?
My day always begins the same way, a cup of coffee and an outline of what I hope to achieve. Whether it's at work, or at home, most of the time I know it's going to be impossible to complete. I can’t conceivably run a line through everything on it, there aren’t enough hours in a day. So I do what needs to be done, as someone I know likes to say “I operate by what’s on fire”. But what happens to those items at the bottom of your list? Do they get pushed to the list for the following day? What do you do when everything feels as if it’s on fire? When flames are engulfing every good intention you have, what then?
As kids we dream big. We have ideas of what we want to be when we grow up, places we want to see. We make lists. What we didn’t realize though, when we wrote these lists, is that life gets in the way. We start with good intentions, plans of college, a career, a family, hitting it big, seeing the world. But before we know it, we’re out of money, out of energy, or just plain out of time. We all have that one thing we meant to do, that thing that's just within our grasp, but we can't seem to nail it down. And if you’re a parent of young children like me, by default you’ve also inherited their goals. And of course you put them before your own.
I’ve lost a few important people to me in the past five years. I wonder about their accomplishments. What would they have done with their lives if they were told that things would be cut short? What would they get to say that they’d done for themselves? From the young chef to the 84 year old man, they each had an agenda, that something that they meant to do but just hadn’t ever gotten around to it.
My writing always looms in my mind. The list I can’t forget, but can’t seem to find the time to complete. I work full time, have a family, a household to run. I try to find time to spread evenly among
it all until I’ve been spread so thin I’m barely doing anything to the fullest. There's always laundry to fold, dishes to be done, family time to spend. It’s an endless cycle. The first thing I push aside? My time to write. In all actuality, isn't it the least important? It's certainly not on fire.
Recently though I’ve made a conscious decision to get back to what I love to do. I woke up one day and thought, how can I effectively teach my children to follow their dreams if I’ve never done so myself? So here I am, making more lists (eek), and writing as much as I can in my spare time. I’m finally about to cross something big off. In mere weeks my first novel will be available for purchase on Amazon. It may not be the most important “to do” but I’m tired of putting out the flames. It’s time to start from the bottom, to accomplish something I intended to do a long ago, even if there’s no valid reason for it. Why waste my life on “meant to’s” when I can spend it on “did do’s”?
