Day Five: Tired as a Tired Thing

Ugh. So, I went to bed earlier than usual tonight, and had trouble this morning dragging myself out of an odd dream (involving a hotel room, like the last time, but this one was about the battle for a contract between two rival mobile phone companies. I’ve probably been exposed to too much iPhone hype over the last few weeks…)

So, I figure I must have slept fairly well. I don’t remember having much problem getting to sleep, anyway. But I felt tired as hell when I finally got up, and I’ve felt like crap all day. It feels, in fact, like I went to bed at 3am, and only caught a couple of hours.

That made the meditation session this morning hard work. I really found it difficult to concentrate at all. Basically I ended up sitting in front of a candle thinking all sorts of thoughts and wishing I was back in bed.

This pattern has continued throughout the day. I used a fair bit of caffeine, although I backed off in the afternoon, so I’d not be too hyper when I actually wanted to sleep this evening.

This morning is also the first time I’ve been in a proper business meeting since I started the meditation, and that really brought it home. I’ve always had problems concentrating in meetings, and find myself drifting off, even when the meeting’s about something I am/should be interested in. Today was no exception, and I was scattered as hell, sometimes giving useful input, sometimes finding my concentration coming back to the meeting with no great recollection of where the previous five minutes had gone. Feh.

I’m really hoping that regular meditation practice improves that aspect of my work.

Anyway.

One more thing for the day: this is meant to be a blog about writing, as well as about meditation. I realised today that I’ve done very little writing this week. I only really worked on Sunday, and that was only 800 words of article.

Today, on the way home, I figured that I might as well try to write, on the grounds that if I could motivate myself and write something while I was this tired, I could definitely do it on other days.

And I did! I did around half an hour’s worth of “free writing”, using one of the many ideas I’ve set aside for this purpose. This one was an SF short story. I didn’t write the whole story, but I’ve got most of it down, and it’s good for first-draft quality. It’s nothing special, but it’s good enough to finish, at least…

So, (a) I’m going to try finishing that one on Thursday (tomorrow evening is the novel-writing course, so I’ll be writing stuff for that instead), and (b) I’m going to try to set myself a daily target of writing for a certain amount of time, or a certain number of words. The latter will be more difficult to count, because I do most of my free writing with pen and paper, but the point is that I’m going to try to sit down and write every single day, because that’s what I’m trying to turn my life towards…

Enough for today, anyway. More tomorrow. I really hope I sleep well tonight.