Flow, yeah, I've known about flow, read the book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a name that I most certainly just cut and pasted, have felt myself hysterical in the warmth and hopeless in the freezing cold of, as Heidi Klum says, "one day you are in, the next day you are out," talked and talked with Myra about being calmer about being in or out, and also the practical matter of, if I'm going to be lost in something, could it be something that pays the bills.
I wish I could say that I just didn't know where the time went when I was writing my screenplay, it was like flying on the wings of Thalia, except that it was like how Julia Roberts knows that she slept with the enemy for three years, seven months, six days. I mean, I lose time blogging. But back to paying the bills, I haven't figured out how to make blogging do that. Like all of the things they tell you to do to make blogging pay the bills just make me aware of time again.
Flow is a state in which it feels like time stands still. It’s when you’re so focused on what you’re doing that you become one with the task. Action and awareness are merged. You’re not hungry, sleepy, or emotional. You’re just completely engaged in the activity that you’re doing. Nothing is distracting you or competing for your focus.
But what I do lose time over, have always lost time over, is the very fabric of time itself ::reverb:: itself itself. I could work on my charts and calendars until the cows come home and after they've gone to bed. And I just started this really intense timetracker. I mean, not because I'm demented. Because I'm starting this business, right? I need to know how long it takes to do things so I know how much to charge for them. So these days I'm actually getting off the couch just so I have something interesting to put down in my timetracker. It's really akin to keeping a food diary in that you just automatically eat better because you're too ashamed to write down junk, I don't want to find out at the end of the week that thirty percent of my life goes to facebook.
But also, hey, I have my first client! Two clients, I'm training them together. They're getting my exclusive first responders rate and I'm getting to figure out how this all works, which is where the timetracker came in. Like I had a good meeting with them and realized afterward at home that there was nothing abstract about coming up with their training plan, this was a concrete task that had to be done by me by Monday. So I set about it, and the next thing I knew, it was 2:00 AM and the sweetie man was quizzing me entirely asleep about when I needed to be woken up the next day, the answer to which was 8:00 AM because I was leading SkateFit, and there are supposed to be rules about me getting eight hours of sleep. "This is a nightmare," I said to Odie, who's always awake when I'm awake, funny how that works out, "you know how I am when I'm working out a workout plan, once I get started, I can't stop," adding in my scorpion voice, "it's in my nature," and he wriggled, which how he nods because his body is one big head. Which is when I realized that this was the opposite of a nightmare, and in fact there was a check in my wallet that went with this thing that I just do. My god, it's like being paid for sleeping and eating.
So last night I was feeling good about knowing what I did every minute last week and thinking that, what, the shit hit the fan in my life around February 2003. Not saying that a lot of awesome things haven't happened in the last ten years, but jeebus, my mom died (2003), my dad died (2004), I quit my job (2005), I got divorced (2006), my sister's cancer came back (2007), my sister died (2010), I had a nervous breakdown (2011)... so you know, I decided way back that in the scope of things, if I couldn't manage to floss, welp. I think just this year I got back to flossing in the morning, but I was still going to bed without brushing my teeth. I know, gross. Don't think too hard about the fact that the whole time I've been writing this blog, I haven't been brushing my teeth before bed. I mean, I brush when I get up.
But last night, I wrapped up my work and entered the time in my timetracker. And then I flossed. And then I brushed. (It took fifteen minutes.)
If I get hit by a bus today, oh well! At least my teeth will be clean!
