Day 2 of my routine for the rest of this month started just after noon, when I awakened with a start. I’d slept far longer than I’d planned, though admittedly this was perhaps due to insomnia. I just could not fall asleep, and resorted to watching an episode of Iron Chef America Season 8 on Amazon Prime. I was also a little sore from the first day of going back to the gym, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

Though I was already feeling very behind schedule, I stuck to the general morning algorithm: take quick shower, feed cats, ignore email, and start a 15-minute push to clarify what I was doing. I spent about half the time reviewing what I wrote the previous day, refining it and breaking out the interesting bits into a list of 26 ways I felt resistance, which could be summed up as, I don’t WANNA do it! because It’s boring / I don’t have everything I need in one place / I am bad at it. The list has a few other nuances, so I’m not going to write it up here, but it’s an interesting line of inquiry. It’s been helping me move past most of my conscious resistances.

But alas, today was not a day where my resistances were conscious. It was one of those days where my mind wandered and just didn’t focus sharply on any one task. My mistake, in hindsight, was not to just pick something to do and do it. Instead, my attention wandered without any conscious control or purpose. I had one conference call via Skype, which lasted for almost two hours, and then after that I ate something and that was that.

I did manage to get a few things done:

• I rebuilt a sub-irrigation planter, layered it with potting mix and tarp, and transplanted a tomoato plant into it. I found all the hose hardware and snaked it from the basement spigot up to the deck, hammering supports into place to keep the hose off the ground. This had been a large task in my mind, but it got done.

• I attended, for the first time ever, a Chinese language group meetup. I had been nervous about going, and I accidentally almost caused an accident when I didn’t see a car in my blind spot, but the meetup itself was informative and got me thinking about how to once and for all become fluent in Chinese. In the past, I have been highly self-conscious about my terrible pronunciation, but with all my recent review of “fears, anxieties, and their names” I knew that it really wasn’t an issue. Go and make mistakes, and be merry!

<

p>I didn’t make it to the gym, though. Maybe Monday-Wednesday-Friday is OK to do this first week. I’m going to have to go to sleep at a reasonable time, too, so I’m finishing up the day with this blog post and have set the alarm to go off at 8AM.

Tomorrow, I want to set some specific to-dos with concrete deliverables. No more than three tasks. I feel some twinge of resistance as I type that…it’s the feeling that I’m setting myself up for failure, and that I’ll fall short. Though it isn’t JUST that…there’s a little bit of fear of being trapped or stuck doing something that I don’t want to do. It doesn’t entirely make sense to me, and I don’t think I am capturing the feeling accurately in words. It seems to be triggered by any promise I make that involves locking myself down to do something that I don’t particularly want to do. Though it’s funny…I haven’t even picked the tasks, and I’m still feeling the negative reaction. My subconscious is automatically associating “have to do” with “this sucks” even if I get to pick the tasks. Fascinating.

[process-2013a]