The Willow Branch Problem

I'm feeling a lot better today than I did yesterday. Physically at least.

I always find that a side effect of getting sick is that when I start feeling better, I get that rubber band of all of these things I didn't do and I don't have the energy to catch up on them all. When your work is as much about what gets pulled out of your brain and put on a page and shared with other people as it is finishing a task list, that expansion and contraction of needs or demands or available resources can feel overwhelming.

Right now I'm coming into springtime here at the farm, which means there's the yearly spring tasks. There's the stuff I put off over the winter. There's the immediate repair things. I've got a pussy willow branch I've got to haul today. I can get it into some water and hopefully grow some more trees off of it. But right now it's just sitting there and obviously I am sitting here fiddling with a stone and talking to you instead of moving it.

So when I try and take that same sort of thinking: I've got a willow branch that I chopped off of a tree because it was splitting and I didn't want to damage the tree further, and it is now a resource that if I move it to the correct place can become many more growing things, and that is actually really good, or I can leave it be and then we can use it for a bonfire in a couple weeks. Okay, either other way is fine. But which to do? And when? And what resources are available? Now in the case of the willow branch this is not a difficult decision. I'll probably move it in about an hour. Just waiting until everyone's awake and moving and I've heard the neighbor's lawnmower, because goodness knows my neighbor's probably gonna use his lawnmower at some point today. 

How do we take that sort of thing and apply it to mind work? I teach photography, chess, and D&D. My ultimate goal is to get out of almost all of that and teach creative writing or do video game analysis as a career.

The good news for me is that because of systems I've built, I now have basically all of my paperwork done for the week. But now that the essentials are out of the way, I still have five hours a day of live classes to teach. How do I separate the work I had to do for maintenance? That's the majority of the work I was doing the last two years, building up my weekly post archive, building up my curriculum. And now that is mostly handled, so I'm beginning to let my brain go into the creative space, or the analytical-about-things-that-I-really-care-about space.

Without panicking because I'm not doing my daily things, even though they're already done. Or feeling like (and this is the big one) feeling like I'm ignoring something that needs doing.

And that's the whole question, isn't it? The whole question of liberty, of freedom. When we have the freedom to do, what do we do? And do we use that freedom to impose our vision on others, or to create, or to make products that we'll sell? Is our goal to make a profit, do creative work, help others?

All of them at the same time?

That's where I am right now: In that place where I need to not make a plan, because I have plans, but do the work.

And doing the work isn't even necessarily the hard part.

How do we pick which novel to write when you're not sure if it will even sell? How do you design a course when you already have successful courses running? How do you make that shift? Not necessarily of your whole career or your whole life, but that small shift of "I have already done the work here, now I'm going to do the work there."

It's a good problem to have. But without a contract for an outlined novel, without a state-mandated curriculum that I'm constantly fighting against, and without giving in to my impending sense of panic that I must finish these things at this time, how do we maintain what we have long enough to grow into a new place?