For being a terrible host and cheekily outwitting death – twice – Sisyphus, an ancient Greek king of Ephyra (later Corinth), was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill. For eternity.
When the tricky king had finally pushed the boulder to the top, it would roll back down again. For eternity.
Now, everyone struggles with procrastination. Everyone struggles with focus, distraction and ooh, look a squirrel. However, not everyone has these thoughts every second of every day when they’re trying to do absolutely anything.
Am I exaggerating? No. Let me explain, in writing the three sentences above this I did the following:
· 15 minutes reading Greek Mythology
· 10 minutes trying to find a podcast to listen to while I write
· Drink coffee
· Play with some coins on my desk – isn’t it weird how a €2, £2 and R5 are so similar. Cool, a Fr2 from 1969, who was Helvetia anyway?
· Scratch my beard - I really need to shave
· Reply to a WhatsApp message – thanks, Gav.
· Drum on the desk – Livin’ on a prayer
· Hum Livin’ on a prayer.
And all the while feel a bit irritated with myself. That’s not before I started writing, that’s during the process of writing three sentences. Three.
Most processes are like this for me.
Most, but not all. There is a moment, a time, a flow state or hyperfocus that I can click into where I can do hours of work in what feels like seconds. Einstein explained relativity as time flying when you're sitting with a nice lady – feel free to look up the quote elsewhere, because if I stop to do it now I will likely be down a worm-rabbit hole for hours.
So, what generates flow and what causes squirrel spotting?
I’m not going to go into dopamine, reward pathways, the limbic system and all that. Yes, I understand it, but it’s not relevant here. (BTW: My brain is dying to dive back into the neuroanatomy, neuroscience and physiology of behaviour right now).
Flow: “Whatever blows your hair back,” said Matt Damon’s Will Hunting. It has to be interesting, fun, new, safe, easy, hard, novel, cool or worthwhile.
I can spend 5 hours making ‘stuff’ in my shed and have it feel like minutes. I can, and have, read books (late at night with nothing else going on) for so long that the sun comes up and embarrassingly, for someone who identifies as Generation X, I can be sucked into a social media whirlpool.
What causes squirrel spotting? Everything else: from paying speeding fines to emptying the dishwasher. Anything mundane to my brain.
Are there drugs? Yes. Do I want to take them? Not at the risk of sacrificing creativity.
I both hate and love my brain. I know I will misplace my phone at least 20 times today but I will also come up with ten story ideas, 15 new scenes, a solution to our reliance on fossil fuels (magnets, it’s all about magnets) and cook my wife a delicious meal – probably Thai green curry tonight.
Writing can be a struggle.
I’ll write and talk more about the struggles and the squirrels, I’m sure.
Today doesn’t feel Sisyphean, which is good.
Accomplishing things is more than a salve, it’s a tonic. Even if the only reason I wrote this today was because I was putting off writing something else.
Damn, there goes that boulder again.
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