Waking up

I feel the need to blog something today, lest an entire month pass without. A bad reason to blog to be sure, but it's not that I've had nothing to blog about, I just haven't gotten round to it. After November's frenzy of writing I've been dormant, in mental hibernation perhaps. Christmas passed unremarked, New Year's resolutions passed me by, I even stopped writing morning pages for several weeks. Whatever the explanation, I have to concede that getting computer games for Christmas has accounted for some of my lassitude, by accounting for an unnerving amount of my free time. So much so, in fact, that I decided to introduce a limiting factor by not allowing myself to play unless I'd done two worthwhile things that day. My definition of 'worthwhile' is distinctly idiosyncratic, though apparently very ingrained. It's not a categorisation which I have invented so much as discovered by noting which activities made feel as if I had been wasting my time (however much I may have enjoyed them), and which didn't. I find it hard to come up with a definition which explains which fits where (reading a book (however bad) is worthwhile, rereading a book (with very few exceptions) is not; watching a film is worthwhile, watching TV is not). This stricture helped, but while blogging counts as worthwhile, I still found myself going for lower-hanging fruit like doing a clothes wash or phoning a family member. And, of course, it didn't prevent me from wasting my evenings away in other ways.

All that seems different today. I find myself with more motivation, for reasons that I wish I understood. Is it getting more light, or something in my diet? Is restarting morning pages a result or a cause? Again, I'm left unsure, reacting to my mental state rather than dictating it. I exaggerate a little; at least I've developed techniques to reinforce positive moods and suppress negative ones. Nevertheless, the image of consciousness as a cork bobbing on unknowable waves is one that I've always found intuitively rings true. I shall just try to take advantage of (and hopefully encourage) my current upsurge, and try to realise some of my current mental mess of purely notional creative projects. And, if I'm lucky, maybe I'll still find the time for the odd game of Mass Effect...