Willingness is an unpredictable and unwieldy thing.
Almost as unwieldy as a vacuum cleaner on the stairs. Ah, the dust bunnies have been banished, finally. They were approaching the age and mass necessary to simulate sentience. All the downstairs litter boxes have been emptied, washed, dried and refilled.
(If you have a good filter on your vacuum, sucking up cat litter is very useful; it packs down the cat fur so the vacuum can breathe again and you don't have to change the bag so often. Yes, I'm that lazy. You're welcome. )
All of this has needed doing for some time (and much more; the list of to-dos is as long as my arm). I have had no motivation to do much of anything lately. Depressed, I suppose. But I chose today, the beginning of a warning-filled heat wave, to do the actual sweaty stuff. Why?
I don't know. Maybe I (unintentionally) bribed myself sufficiently yesterday; maybe the filth reached the critical mass of "I can't stand this anymore," maybe my hormones reached a tipping point; maybe I wanted to do something nice for myself; maybe the grey is lifting. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Whatever the cause, the house is much nicer smelling and less oppressive in many ways. Just hot. I intend to treat myself to a milkshake for my efforts (and as a sop because I'm going to the store even though I'd been determined not to leave the house today).
In addition to fighting depression, I lack actual ambition. There are things I want to do in my life, but I have no burning need to DO anything for myself to leave my mark on the world. I'd just like to leave it better than I found it.
And the whole "motivational" industry leaves me slightly bothered and relatively unmoved. (Sometimes even depressed; when I see the amazing things people have accomplished despite setbacks, I see myself as *even more* of useless self-absorbed slacker, and ... well, once that self-flagellation train heats up, it can run for weeks.)
In order to get myself to do things for me alone, I look to willingness instead. It's easier for me to get my head around, an easier tool to use to pry and dig my way through the morass of thoughts and emotions that periodically set my life in concrete. My willingness is also, as I said above, unwieldy and unpredictable. Bribery, sadly, works well. (Chocolate is my friend). Trades work. Starting small works. Occasionally trickery or even Tequila works. "Just give it a try" works if I haven't done it before.
But sometimes I surprise myself; I *initiated* conversation with three different strangers yesterday and kept it going past when I normally would have lapsed into silence, letting them be the sole food for the interaction. I didn't even have to pump myself up to do it, and I didn't beat myself up for a single sentence afterwards.
I would like to think I've broken through that brick lack-of-motivation wall in my writing as well. Two days ago I finally wrote a new short story, the first I've written in a month. It's still on paper, long-hand, because I woke up in the wee hours with the first sentence. I've got a couple of ideas to improve it and questions to brainstorm before I type it in, so that's encouraging as well.
And I'm willing to try. This itself is huge.
Progress. I'll take that.
