The Numbers Game #1

I have just had, according to my watch, over nine hours sleep. Looking at the breakdown of deep, REM and light (plus the inevitable awake time) on the tiny screen made my brain this morning do a double-take. Yesterday I was so mentally taut that I could not manage simple multiplication: I KNEW bits of my brain were struggling. I’ve opened the front door twice this week and left keys in the lock.

I have also spent five days re-writing something that was rejected. All of my time and effort (which really should have been focussed in other spaces and not that) absolutely demanded that the task was done. The reason why this was so important has only now made itself clear. Sometimes, my writing process isn’t about success. It is purely and simply about instigating progress.

You see, there was very little actual rewriting that took place.

The first thing that has happened most days now for what I realise must be about four years or so (looking at the number of games I have played) is Solitaire. This may seem odd to be recording in the middle of a writing blog but this is important. Consistency, at least for me, has been built on a foundation of numerical data. It’s turning up, every day, and trying to move forward.

The last time I checked on Strava I’ve recorded some form of exercise every week for nearly seven years, which tracks quite neatly with the progress of my poetry journey. Without physical effort, mental fitness simply would not have been enough to keep me going, especially in the periods of extreme pressure. I have pushed myself into ability on many days using this method alone.

So, this week I forced myself to rebuild something from a standing start.

The feedback was SO GOOD and so useful and it pointed out a flaw in my numbers game that had simply not been apparent before. I needed to see if I could actually do what had been suggested. An old piece of work was dusted off and poems I had assumed were not good because they too had not been accepted were pulled out and put into a different context. Failure changed into determination.

The resultant, ‘new’ work, which is older in write time than it was, has done really rather remarkable things to my brain. There is also zero desire to even consider poetry this weekend, and for all the rest of this month, which is what really needed to happen because starting next week I will finally start laying to rest another massively problematic part of my existence using stanzas.

As one part of the process comes to an end, another is beginning.

This is here on a weekend as an additional reminder to myself. Recording everything, even the days when you go backwards, has a value beyond the moment they exist in. Being able to consider your life as data alone might not sound that attractive to some of you, and as someone who for many years hated to be told that numbers do not lie, it still very much is an alien concept.

Then I remember all the beauty and joy in existence would not exist if there was not a precise framework holding it together. The human brain is very much the chaotic element in the centre, of course, but the progress and the process are inextricably tied to it all. I can’t make associations and leaps in logic and belief without a healthy mind. Puzzles help enormously, Exercise makes me tired.

Maybe I could do with making sleep more of a priority going forward ^^