Fun Fact about Questing: it literally applies to all of the things.
You can quest your way through personal development, job-hunting, meal-planning, book-writing, and - as I started implementing these past few days - cleaning your house once and for all.
Stick with me on this one, I have a point.
I’ve spent my entire life being terrible at picking up after myself. Terrible at maintaining tidyness even if I have a chance at starting from a place of zero mess. My brain would immediately start picking up all the items around me (while my body didn’t move at all) and start planning where each item should live and then someone - a parent or sibling or someone else equal parts well-meaning and impatiently annoyed - would tell me to stop "over-analyzing" and "just get it done."
The "just do it" mantra is incredibly flawed.
It’s actually easy to just do something because "doing" implies you’ve already started and it’s starting that’s actually the tricky part. I’m in the midst of writing this book and it’s going along really well except every time I sit down to start a new writing session all I see around me is mess.
And when all around I see me is mess, all my brain wants to do is mentally put it all away and then actually put those things away as I imagined doing it. Months ago, I put aside the negative associations with over-analyzing and figured out the order of steps that allow me to clean all the dishes in my house in one day (after a month of slowly making all them dirty and then stacking them around the kitchenette, like you do).
Just the process of brainstorming this book helped me see how I had step-by-step quested my way to a simple system of taking care of my little kitchen. Now, struggling to start a writing session so I can just write the book, I’m constantly looking at the rest of my messy abode and not doing anything about it, or puttering as a means of procrastination.
Puttering is procrastination, so-called "over-analyzing" is a way of visualizing a task from beginning to end and seeing yourself do all the work and therefore building the mental strength to get it done. My brain has finally made the very direct connection of over-analyzing as a visualization exercise (a thing which friggin’ brain surgeons and olympic athletes do to prep themselves before heading into the ER or onto the playing field).
I’m writing a book about questing the crap out of your daily life and it’s making my whole body want to quest the crap out of all the things in my life. The book is - essentially - preaching, while the cleaning I am hereby taking a week to get good and done is practice.
And how could I possibly ask you to practice what I preach, without being willing to do the same for myself.
So, no chapter this week. Just a note of hope to anyone who was told to go against their "over-analyzing" nature. Because in storytelling we call that world-building and that is everything.
Next week I plan on boasting a clean apartment along with the next chapter segment!
Good journey, my friends, til we meet again,
Rose
