I was gonna do a weekly themed post…but this might be the one and only.

Saffron

Themed posts always seem like a good idea to me. Making a personal goal to consistently write something within a theme, at least once a week, like ‘Fishy Fridays’, or ‘Monday Munchies’, or maybe try a monthly thing, like ‘February Favorites’ or whatever. Then I laugh at myself and scrap the whole thing. Who am I kidding?

Paprika

I’ve been joking that I always seem to leave every personal project 87% finished. Yes, 87% is an odd percentage, but that’s how I feel. I cannot commit to goals, especially personal ones since nobody except me knows about them. Once, I had a list of long term and short term goals written out. Someone saw it on my desk and found it hilarious that one of my long term goals was ‘do laundry’. Yes folks, one day I believed I could accomplish the difficult task of laundering my clothes in the distant future. Why oh why did I feel the need to write that one down?

Because I am the epitome of procrastination.

Tumeric

Now, you might picture an apartment with heaping piles of dirty clothes strewn around and stacks of dirty dishes in the sink and who knows what, but this place is actually pretty organized. I would never let this place get dirty. I clean when I need to clean, I cook when I want to cook, and I do photography when I feel like it.

But I cannot follow schedules or lists of goals. I’ve tried.

Celery Seed

I had this goal of submitting 20 photographs to various agencies per week. I think I did that one week, and the next week was more sporadic. I also use to write down daily recipes for the entire month for this blog, but the calendar is still showing the month of September, with recipes for the first half of the month written up, and only half of those I ended up cooking for the blog. How is it October already, anyway?!

Fennel

Another goal I had was to try using one new spice on my spice rack at least once a week, write about the benefits of the spice, you know, try something new. So as I was looking at all my unused spices, I decided to play with my macro lens and take pictures of the spices up close.

It just seemed more fun to me.

Thyme

And that’s when I had the great idea to do weekly themed posts of food ingredient macro shots. But I realized I couldn’t commit to that either. I didn’t want to complete a task for the sake of completing it. So what if I leave 10 projects 87% finished? I like multi-tasking. And eventually, one will get finished here and there. And the ones that are fun at the time will feel more satisfying when I finish them, and on top of that,  I would’ve actually enjoyed it.

Coriander

Sound crazy? Well, lemme ask you this. Have you ever started reading a book, but had a hard time finishing it? And you just kept trudging on even though you felt stuck? And you didn’t want to pick up a new book because you felt you had to finish the one you were already reading? Just start reading the new book. I have 7 books on my nightstand. When I didn’t feel like reading a depressing book, I started a new, happier book. When I wanted the depressing book again, I stopped reading the happy one and continued the depressing one. And so on. They all get finished eventually. Unless it’s a really bad book, in which case the book can sit there for years.

And that’s ok too.

 

Sesame Seed

I think many of us feel like we have to fill every second of every day with tasks, goals, or hobbies because we’re a masochistic society that thrives on punishing ourselves, believing it’s lazy to be idle. And we always feel like failures if we don’t accomplish our goals. It was drilled into our brains in school at some point. It probably had to do with homework. The scatterbrained kids were thought to have learning disabilities, the kids with ‘ADD’ were thought to have learning disabilities, basically any kid who couldn’t follow the rules like the machines they were programmed to be were considered odd. I’m probably going to get off track soon. See? I don’t even know the point of my rambling.

Basically what I’m trying to say (very badly) is within all the scattered thoughts, and half finished goals in life, there is a basic underlying theme we were all meant to follow in our lives. And it doesn’t have to be forced. Why not go with the flow and see where it takes us?