There are only twenty-four hours in a day. I try to devote anywhere from seven to eight of those hours to sleep. I mentioned sleep first because you must understand that, like the fox in the above photo, sleep is my favorite thing to do.
I am required to spend nine hours at my full-time seed money gig (and that doesn’t count commute time). I hang out with my son, eat, sometimes cook, do chores, pray, write and read for school. I read submissions for the two literary magazines I work for and then there’s that hour a week I devote to Game of Thrones. Sprinkled in are church attendance, the time I spend volunteering in the church bookstore, and time with my extended family.
With all of that, it feels as though I have something going every hour of the day. I no longer sit on the couch and binge-watch Netflix. I can’t lay out in my backyard and reread Agatha Christie novels (which is fine because I don’t miss the subsequent mosquito bites.) I no longer have time to do nothing.
When I first began the pursuit of my MFA, I asked one of the women who had been in the program for a year how I was supposed to do it all? She told me that I couldn’t. She told me that I would have to choose.
I spent all of Sunday catering to my son, who has a virus and working on my draft that’s due on Friday morning. There are dirty dishes in my sink and I still haven’t folded last week’s laundry. I’m going to have to leave early in the morning to get both my son’s bus fare and his lunch money from the ATM because I couldn’t leave him to go do it during the day. I may even have to throw a load of clothes in the washing machine at 5 AM because there’s no way I can do it now. Right now I am working on this week’s posts.
Right before I got super busy, God showed me a race. The runners were behind the line, revving up and eager to go. He told me that it wasn’t time to run yet, but that I should rest and wait because once the race started I wouldn’t be able to rest for a long while.
I did rest a good deal during the previous months, so when I started running I thought I was ready. What I didn’t understand was that I could get distracted by trying to take on more than one race at a time. Not only is that not a very smart thing to do, it’s impossible. No matter how many hours there are in a day, I can only concentrate on one task until it is complete… And right now that task is The Game of Thrones because really, Jon Snow deserves my immediate attention. He deserves everyone’s immediate attention.
Keep Writing. It'll All Work Out. 