Ready

[merest]

Remarkably, I was wrong, it did not rain last night, though the weather did end up cooling down, anyway. 

There are still a lot of frogs in the pond near where I walk, one of them is almost as big as my palm! 

I'm expecting to lose them, come first frost, but the fact that they're still there despite several days of cool weather was a surprise.

We're back to Monday, the start of the week, I may try to get back on my typewriter, today, at least for a bit. 

Once again, if I can just establish a good habit-pattern with this, I'm sure I could get a lot more done, but I keep faltering after one or two days, falling back into an undesired routine.

I can say I'm pretty close to finishing The Maltese Falcon. I definitely have some thoughts on it, but with only thirty pages or so left, and a desire to keep this particular entry short if I can, I think I'll hold off on talking about it for later. 

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> There are still a lot of frogs in the pond near where I walk, one of them is almost as big as my palm! <<

Yay frogs!

Here I have tree frogs, but it's been so dry that I haven't seen them. :(

>> Once again, if I can just establish a good habit-pattern with this, I'm sure I could get a lot more done, but I keep faltering after one or two days, falling back into an undesired routine. <<

New habits take time to establish. Every day you meet the goal is progress. For the rest, think of it like meditation: other thoughts will intrude, so just set them aside and go back to your focus.

Re: Thoughts

[merest]

I love tree frogs, but we don't have them where I live, so I have to make do with pond and river friends. I hope you get some rain and a chance to see them before the season ends.

Fair enough about the habits - I suppose I may be kvetching in excess, here. Focusing more on the wins rather than letting myself get cynical about the losses, and all that jazz.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Part of it is the wider culture's fixation on "unbroken strings" of doing a thing. While that can help during a string, it backfires the moment the string breaks, becoming a reason to binge bad habits.

If instead you look at every instance of a good habit as a success, then you keep building up more and more success. If you miss days, it just means you progress more slowly instead of being a total failure and having to start over from scratch. This approach works very well for things like writing and crafts where the amount matters a lot, as well as life choices where incremental change tends to last better than abrupt change such as walking or eating healthier foods. And it takes practice to make that mental shift too, from "success is an unbroken string of doing the thing every day" to "success is every day spent doing the thing."