The HEA Cafe

… to write!

It’s scary to think how much time I can waste checking emails, reading blogs and generally surfing the Internet, especially when recently I had a total of sixteen hours over a weekend in which to write, but probably wasted a good twelve of them fiddling around.

But time spent on the Internet garnered gold for me when I stumbled across a piece of writing by Johann Von Goethe. “Lose this day loitering,” Goethe wrote in the early nineteenth-century, “twill be the same story tomorrow …(and soon) days are lost lamenting over days.”

That brought me up by the bootstraps, especially when I found other long stretches of what could have been writing time spent “loitering” wthout intent to do much of anything in particular. In the same essay, Goethe stresses that we must “seize this very moment … only engage and the mind grows heated, begin it and the work will be completed.”

So, inspired by Goethe I stopped loitering and began … In the past three days I’ve written over 6,500 words, that’s probably 5,000 words more than I would have done without Mr. Goethe’s inspiring (and scary) words pushing me forward.

It’s easy to form habits - good or bad - the trick is to form the ones that hurtle us forward toward our goals and dreams, not hold us back so that we end up lamenting over lost days. Goethe’s words are pinned above my computer screen and I set them out below in the hope they might inspire other “loiterers” out there …

Lose this day loitering, twill be the same story
Tomorrow, and the rest more dilatory;
Thus indecision brings its own delays
And days are lost lamenting over days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Courage has genius, power and magic in it;
Only engage and then the mind grows heated.
Begin it and the work will be completed.

Tricia
www.tricia-jones.com