The Apollo Flytrap

I'm not as patient as if like to think I am, especially with myself. I tend to rush things instead of letting them develop and grow naturally. I tend to forget the importance of small, consistent acts that accumulate and compound over time: whether it's by skipping 10 BPM ahead when learning a song when I should be inching forward by 2, or adding 15 minutes of runtime when k should be adding 5, or cutting my calories by 40% when I should be cutting 10%.

I think most reasonably intelligent understand the importance and power of consistent, incremental improvements. So why do I keep repeating the same pattern of running hot and burning out?

Part of it is a romanticisation of the secluded, obsessive artist who works away furiously on her magnum opus for weeks. The quasi-masochistic athlete who exceeds his body's thresholds to transcend.

Part of it is a fear that I will die before I finish. Although then I'd ask myself whether the hyper-hypoactive cycle is really the way that will allow me to achieve my ends. Or perhaps it's the fear that inspiration will not strike again.

Now the truth is that it may very well be. Why not indulge in inspiration when it strikes? In fact I woke up at 3am this morning thinking about how to end a chapter in my novel. I stopped working on it for months, am now rewriting the six or so chapters I completed and feel it is so much better for it.

That's what's tricky. There isn't a right approach. The balance is hard to find because the weights at either side of the scale keep shifting. Perhaps it'll be best to fight my urge to write if it means foregoing other things like music and fitness. Then again, it may be more productive to frame it as "channelling" this excitement that's building in relation to my work.

I also thought up the possibility that my writing is producing the greatest amount of satisfaction for the effort I put in. So maybe a part of my mind is subtly directing me to focus on what is most profitable. Yet this comes at the cost of other activities, other sources of well being. In the modern world, instincts that served us well in the hunter gatherer days may need contemplative tempering nowadays.