Prioritising

Sometimes in life, you achieve more in a day than in a month.

You need to accept this and be prepared for this as when you have high expectations (as I do), it can be frustrating. This is one of the reasons why I set myself objectives for the coming year with individual items that I can tick off line by line.

Small victories ensure that life continues flowing forward even when circumstances are against you as they have been for me today.

You feel demotivated and the time drags rather than speeding along as it typically does. It is frustrating as there are always a million things that you can tick off, yet through no fault of your own, you feel as though you have achieved nothing.

You have woken up and meandered through the day without purpose or direction when what you really wanted to do was tick off a thousand objectives. It happens and it is annoying but through having smaller objectives that you can switch your attention to, you can provide comfort to yourself. You can turn a negative into a positive.

It is tough, I will completely acknowledge that but that is life. As you get older, you realise that there is no reset switch, you cannot push a button and go back to change your actions, you can only move forward. Sometimes that will be at a pace and for others, you will struggle to crawl along but you just have to keep going.

The alternative of course is death and whilst we must all cross that bridge at one point, it is something that we will only cross when we have to. Until that point we need to make the most of every moment as realistically, they may not come again and we cannot predict how each day will change.

The randomness of life is something that is both amazing and highly irritating at the same time. On one hand, it is great because it provides our lives with challenges and prevents them from stagnating but it also offers us a level of annoyance that needs to be countered.

Writing is something that has always provided me with a level of therapeutic output and it is something that I include in every day of my life. A thousand words a day was my challenge at the start of the year and whilst I have never needed an excuse to write it is good to have it as an established thread for moments like this.

When the mood is low and you feel as though you have wasted hours of your life, it is frustrating as you know that those hours will not be provided back to you. You cannot jump into a time machine and repeat the day to ensure that your value is achieved through every action, you simply need to learn and adapt. To shift your goals for the day.

The reason for my annoyance today? Overhearing the conversations of those higher up the food chain, hearing my name and those I work with and not being in the room when it was happening, as all this has left me with is plenty of frustrations…something that I wrote about the other day. I have dealt with it as written down but the torture feels as though it has continued from start to finish.

To overhear parts of a conversation that are taken out of context and then leave your brain to fill in the blanks. It is the most demoralizing situation to find yourself in as you sit down and stare at the screen, placing your thoughts down and trying to stay positive whilst all the time your brain is spinning out of control and your ability to compromise has reduced to that of Donald Trump in court.

I have been unable to concentrate owing to the consideration that any of the words I have heard could be melded together to create something worrying for me. Maybe that is a very selfish way of considering the situation but that is one that cannot be avoided as we all have concerns, we all have needs and we all have objectives that need to be ticked off.

My predominant thought is worry due to the consideration that I do not want to let anyone down. Not myself or my wife as I have bills to pay. I need to be able to meet my commitments as otherwise that would place a lot of pressure on my partner and I would feel guilty.

The rational side of me knows that if there was anything seriously wrong then someone would have said something but the irrational keeps poking my brain into worry.

The lesson that we all need to remember through any situation that is out of our control is that sometimes we need to ride the wave and ensure that we reach the end. We may fall a couple of times but as long as we continue to get back on the wagon, we will never be left out to sea, to be washed away, with no hope of return.

I feel as though the day has been wasted. Through worry and concern over elements that I have no control over and that is something to be annoyed about as I will never have this day again. I have turned this into a narrative that will hopefully offer me something in the future but for now, all I have is frustration and the need to turn it into a constructive output.

The words may never be used but they have offered me a point to focus on for the day, for which otherwise I may have given up and simply headed down the pub. Something that still sounds great, yet in the long run it is better to do something than nothing.