Octavia Butler writes in her essay Furor Scribendi:
“[F]orget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
I'm trying to cultivate that persistence in practice with regards to a number of habits, one of which is blogging. Although I don't plan to blog every day, I want to have a better habit around sharing reflections on here.
To that end, I finally created a new bullet journal set-up to hopefully keep me on track with forming these habits with intention and persistence. The goal is that if I map out the next few weeks of habit stuff, I don't have decision fatigue of what I should work on that day- I can just get to it.
One thing I'm already noticing is that these habits at the start feel like extra obligations that I can procrastinate on and have anxiety around doing. I know that as I get the rhythm going, the start-up costs will be less and less, and some of that inertia will keep me going. In the meantime though, my goal is to get the habits done as early in the day as possible so I can relax for the rest of the day, or at least know that I already got done what I had set out to do.
I'll also be traveling over the next few weeks, so I'm hoping that mapping out what I can do each day will let me keep on top of these habits despite being on the go. Little by little, poco a poco, I am trying to cultivate that "persistence in practice" that Octavia was able to find herself, so much so that , I can't stop it.