Self-starter stuff

Writers write, right?

Somehow I've got to carve out some time each day to write; posting on this blog might be that only time for a while. I've got to leave the television during this fascinating election season, leave the political readings and writings, leave the silly little writings I do now and then, and focus on my writing "career". Hopefully I'll post here more frequently, even if only short posts.

I want to go back to the quote from one of John Wesley's letters, which I wrote about in a couple of post recently. Here's the quote, with particular part I want to focus on today highlighted.

“…I am afraid of nothing more than of growing old too soon, of having my body worn out before my soul is past childhood. Would it not be terrible to have the wheels of life stand still, when we had scarce started for the goal; before the work of the day was half done, to have the night come, wherein no one can work? I shiver at the thought of losing my strength before I have found [it]; to have my senses fail ere I have a stock of rational pleasures, my blood cold ere my heart is warmed with virtue! Strange, to look back on a train of years that have passed, 'as an arrow through the air,' without leaving any mark behind them, without our being able to trace them in our improvement!”

"Before the work of the day was half done"--that is written for me. I feel like so much of my time is not productive, is not seeing results. It is the true "arrow through the air", doing nothing but move invisible gases. At work, much of what I do now is self-starter stuff. I work alone, waiting for people to call of come by my desk with their most difficult engineering problems. Yet almost all the people who came by on a regular basis, who cared about learning how to solve their problems, have been laid off. Now, with few exceptions, I only see those who want me to solve their problem for them, not teach them how to solve it. When waiting for these problems to come my way, I have my own residual projects with soft, self-imposed deadlines, and I have work to keep our corporate engineering standards up to date. It is all self-starter stuff, and I find myself not self-starting the stuff.

My writing is all self-starter stuff, except for this Life Group study I'm developing, writing, and teaching; well, I guess that is self-starter stuff, cause I self-started it. But all the other stuff I want to write, I have to make myself do it. In the words of Emerson, "the good world manifests very little impatience" for my writings. If I don't go after it, I'm not even moving invisible gases.

In all this self-starter stuff, especially the non-vocational stuff, something must yield to make way. Yet, with a fixed number of hours in the day, little is left to yield. While in my mind I embrace that "there is time enough for all that I must do", reality is that the days are clicking off toward that time when the night comes, "wherein no one can work." The road to publishing is so long and arduous, that right now I truly fear "the wheels of live [will] stand still" long before my self-starter stuff is done.

An arrow through the air.