Ever have one of those days where nothing on your to-do list gets checked off? When life has other plans for you?
That happens to me more often than I care to admit. Despite my writing-by-the-seat-of-my-pants method to drafting, I’m a planner in the rest of my life. Or at least, I try to be organized like that.
Realistically, my email inbox is a disaster and my answer when people ask me how I accomplish so much is, “I flail randomly. I don’t recommend it.” Even before I started writing, a motto of mine was, “I plan. God laughs.”
I used to stress about those days. But I guess I’ve now lived long enough to realize the world doesn’t end if we fall apart or slack occasionally. The to-do list will still be there for us tomorrow.
I wouldn’t recommend letting hard deadlines slide, but most of our deadlines are internal rather than external. And those are prime candidates for stressing us out more than necessary.
Case in point, this post is the result of one of those days. Luckily, it was a good one of those days.
I was going to write a post about how to make a problematic story come together, but that’s going to have to wait until next week. Heck, I was going to remember to eat lunch yesterday. Dinner barely happened. (Yay for delivery pizza!) Yeah, writing one of my typical epic-sized posts wasn’t in the cards.
Instead, my day was taken up by a new, all-consuming family project. Yes, that’s right. A year after the loss of my 21-year-old cat, we decided to add to the family.
Meet Raven, my newest distraction. *smile*
We rescued this tiny 8-week-old girl from the pound yesterday. She’s adorable, cuddly, and has the loudest purr I’ve ever heard. She runs to me when I sit on the floor (“Mommy!”) and loves falling asleep in one of our laps. We’ll see how long that lasts before she wants to be a keyboard-sitting cat. *grin*
Suffice it to say that this little kitten was the most spoiled cat alive yesterday. She went from a small death-row cage to tearing up and down the hallway of her new home. *gallop, gallop, gallop* (Wow, this place is big enough for me to run!”) *passes out in the nearest lap*
So while I had great plans for today’s post, it couldn’t compete with Raven discovering her shadow in a sunbeam for the first time. *pounce* *bonks into wall* Or her scampering after us throughout the house, heeling as well as a dog. Or the giggles of the whole family as we watched her learn about the existence of these cool things called… *squee* Toys!
I’ve posted a lot about how we have to be willing to make sacrifices for our writing sometimes, and I still believe that. But that doesn’t mean we should sacrifice all the time, or even every weekend. In fact, sometimes we have to know when living life is the most important thing on our to-do list. *smile*
How do you handle days when you can’t cross anything off your to-do list? Do you scramble to catch up, or do you shrug it off like Scarlet O’Hara and say “Tomorrow is another day”? Do you ever take life-needs-me mental health days? Do you have any cute animal stories to share?
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