(Visual alliteration is kind of cheating, isn't it?)
(On the other hand: When I sat down to write, that's the first thing that came to mind, and damn is it descriptively apt.)
The third anniversary of the start of the Free Refills project is a couple of weeks away, and I feel proud that over the entire course of that time, I have never failed to reach my quota, and have been close to perfect with my daily deadlines. (Furthermore, I forgive myself my few misses--the reasons were mostly pretty solid.) To pull off this level of consistency, I've had to do away with any real attachment to ideas like, "I work best in the morning, and I don't work well in the evening." While I do still prefer mornings, I've certainly learned that I have the capacity to do quality work whenever there's work to be done. I will complete the tasks I've assigned myself, and if that means I need to write at 10:30pm on a Saturday, I'll do so.
On the other hand, I do think back kind of fondly to when my practice was more regimented. I remember stretches of time when I'd work from 8am until noon every weekday. (It's my experience, and something I've heard many writers echo, that four hours of active writing is kind of the limit.) That kind of structure does tend to smooth out some of the ups and downs that my current process--"Get the work done every week, no matter what, but otherwise stay flexible"--kind of invites.
On top of that, there are days like today, when out of necessity I'll schedule various tasks and errands in the early part of the day, trusting that I'll have plenty of time to work later. But when I sit down to write at the end of the day, I find that I'm just beat.
Like I said above, I remain proud that I don't let that fatigue keep me from doing my work. But given what I've been saying in the past few weeks about trying to cultivate a sense of play in my work and throughout my life in general, it does strike me that if I'm creating a situation in which my body is asking me to rest, to put a cap on the day and start relaxing, and I am instead doing the very opposite, I'm letting my current patterns undermine my best intentions for positive change.
How often does self-defeating behavior come so clearly into focus? I'm not beating myself up about it (believe it or not). But it seems pretty clear that I need to make a change.