Conflict and Resolution: Well, Excu-uuuse Me!

Storytellers like to say that all stories, good stories, have conflict and resolution. There is a challenge that confronts the hero, and by the end of the story you have some closure — either the hero has new resolve or a solution has been achieved.

There are exceptions of course, sometimes that hanging thread makes for an emotional coda.

The hanging thread is what I’m here to talk about today, why, for this example, I don’t always post regularly.

I’m going to skip the usual excuses, and keeping with the tone of this site find the explanation and use it to target a solution instead of using it to get out of the real work.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then you need to maintain the distinction between understanding yourself and making excuses for yourself, even if they sometimes use the same words. 

My current obstacle is that I am short on time and my intermittently limited motivation sometimes lets me trade something I want to do (like create a quality blog post) for something I also enjoy (like watching one of the television shows stacked up on my TiVo.)

The irony of it is, if I wanted to be as casual in posting as I am about watching TV, I could post all day, but sort of snarky, throwaway, funny, clever or biting posts are the landscape of my Tumblr and Twitter feeds. This blog was built to have more weight and introspection, so it takes longer than one would imagine to create what I consider a “quality post” — my measurement not yours — so sometimes it feels like a bite of time I can’t take.

But this project is also about building habits: creating, editing, confessing and publishing.

So I’m not going to resolve, or promise, or anything. But here’s a post. It’ll help me when I come across it again, and maybe it will help you. At the end of the day excuses don’t count for much if anything, but explanations that lead to understanding and creation do. So there will be more posts, and sometimes, they should be shorter, because, well, poems range from haiku to Dante’s three-volume “Divine Comedy.”

—–David

P.S. But for the record I have a presentation that I need to work on, a long music performance to edit, a spreadsheet of data to process which will actually earn me money, housework, and a full TiVo and Netflix list. Oh and it’s bedtime and I really like to sleep. (Not on normal people’s schedules, though)

I also have better habits now than I used to, and that gives me the confidence that I will be able to get all of those things in a manageable order.

P.P.S. Ha, I can’t post tonight because of technical errors out of my control!

Also published on Medium.