When it all feels impossible

Some days it seems the universe is aligning against you. You want to write (or, insert your own pursuit, i.e. exercise, read War and Peace, practice break-dancing), and everything else suddenly needs your attention. It feels impossible to pursue your dream. Everything else needs you and your goal will have to wait, again.

Maybe yesterday the water company decided to tear up your street and shut off your water, leaving you today in heaps of laundry and dishes, with sadistic flies that swirl over your head, taunting you.

Or you find that Hippo 4 leaked out of his diaper in the night, and you have to change all the bedding, again (because he just did it the night before as well).

Or maybe another nameless Hippo used the toilet and somehow pee ended up all over the place (although he doesn't remember how) and you have to do a thorough cleaning of the whole place (which to be honest, really needed it anyways, but still).

And what if, two days before the day you're going to "really get a whole lot done" you decide to be kind and include a stray cat who looks sickly while you're feeding your own two to three cats (the ownership of cats is a fluid thing around here, as they decide to hang around or not). And then, you're just guessing, that stray cat sometime in the night decided to leave the grossest poop-apocalypse on your front porch, and chair, and bench that you've ever seen (I won't go into details). And you find yourself devoting at least 45 minutes to scrubbing your porch with bleach, like an old scrub-brush woman, on your knees. This on the day you're going to "really get a whole lot done."

So what's the point? The point is that there will always be something important, or immediate, or that you have to do right now, and it will always try to pull you away from what you want to be doing, which is working towards your dream. And you will probably get frustrated at these circumstances, or people, or animals.

But you know, what you really need to do is just get those things done (if they really are important, and you're not just procrastinating, more on that later...), and get back to work. And you will find, even on a day like I mentioned above, which if you didn't guess, was my day today (for the most part)... you will find that you can still deal with a number of fairly gross emergencies, and it will only be 10 o'clock in the morning by the time you're done. (This assumes that you didn't wake up at 9:45).

So here's the real point. Setbacks and emergencies will come, but they really don't have to be that bad. Just get in there and scrub up the gunk, and get back to what you want to do. Don't use it as an excuse to lament how the universe is against your dreams/goals and there's no point even trying, or that there is no point doing anything today. Each today is actually pretty long. You CAN find little moments in the day to get even one thing done. One scene. One blog post. One session of stretches. Whatever it is.

And hopefully tomorrow you will really get to get a whole lot done. But if not just do something. And you'll get there.