Distraction

I hate distractions.  My life is my work, so I have slowly minimized distractions so I can get on with my work.  Sure, work is loosely defined somedays – writing, for instance, is considered part of my work whenever The Muse calls.

I reduced the number of things I own many years back, and discovered it reduced the amount of distractions I had.  I found I could easily isolate myself at will, reducing those distractions and focus on my work.  I even created my work environment in such a way to balance my social needs with my need to be distraction free, filtering and optimizing my socialization.

My work is my life, my life is my work.  Nearly all day, every day, I toiled by myself.  Distraction free, I could easily put 16 to 18 hours a day into my work.  I didn’t date – sure, I had problem finding someone interesting, but it really boiled down to a need to handle my work.  The benefit of someone in my life against the amount of distraction they caused just didn’t balance.

She wasn’t a distraction.  She wasn’t interesting.  Not at first.  Just an old friend who could use a hand getting resettled into an old life.

It starts small, as such things are prone to do.  A text message here.  A phone call there.  At first I growl at such distractions from my day, but as she’s an old friend, exceptions are to be made for such distractions.

Slowly it builds, on a nearly daily basis.  The distraction grows – it becomes more frequent text messages, and longer, more frequent phone calls.  The the tug begins.

Small, imperceptible at first, that tug causes a momentary distraction in my work.  A moment where I consider calling her, and do.  Or a moment when she crosses my mind, vaguely wondering what’s she up to at the moment.  I shake it off, and plow on with my work.  There’s too much to do, I’ve got to get my work done.

The tug’s pull begins to slowly gain strength, pulling me towards my newfound distraction.  I barely know her, but slowly discover she’s interesting and I must learn more.  The tug builds on it’s own strength – the more times it pulls me there, pulls me towards her, the stronger it gets.

Soon it snowballs.  It’s no longer a random phone call.  It’s a daily phone conversation lasting for hours as we both share about ourselves, our pasts, our lives, our hates, our desires all flow easily and naturally.

Days are spent together at times, evenings chatting until the world has long since gone silent.  The work suffers, by my life does not.

A balance begins – the tug pulls nearly nonstop, but it becomes it’s own form of motivation.  The work quits suffering – in fact, the work becomes better.  The Muse calls more frequently, empowering my wordsmith abilities.  Sometimes The Muse calles even to just give me a sweet or witty comment to make to her.  Things that took nearly all day now get done in hours.  The tug, nearly omnipresent, drives me harder, faster.  Instead of optimizing my life to accommodate my work, my work becomes optimized to accommodate my life.  A single distraction changes my entire being, my reason for life.  My work is no longer my life.

Someday my distraction will leave.  They always do.  She’ll find what she’s seeking, which is elsewhere.  Again, they always do.  The cycle will begin again as I slowly minimize my distractions in my life to focus on my work.  My life will be my work, and my work will be my life.

But there’s a glimmer.  A small hope.  Maybe she’s not a distraction.  Maybe she doesn’t find what she’s seeking elsewhere.  Maybe work was the distraction the whole time.

 

———- Writing Notes ———-

This was a “whim” caused my The Muse. This actually will probably end up as one of the threads in a book I’ve been thinking about for about a year now (before I actually started writing.) The book is pieces of my life, and pieces of other people’s lives and how a single connection, or a single reconnection, turns it upside down. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and sometime it just makes things as it should be.

Now, I call it a “whim” because while it’s a short thing, it’s based in reality. Sometimes we give ourselves a little leeway to say things in writing we’d never say in person. Sometimes it’s a lack of balls, or sometimes, like in my case, it’s rules and taboos we’ve created for ourselves.

Anyway – yay! My first Deviant writing :-)

(Addition to the writing notes:  this was my first foray into publicly posting my writings, and represents a raw nerve sort of writing that goes with Muse and some of short stuff that I write.)

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