Watching The Wheels #HappyMonday #JohnLennon

All apologies: Again, I’m writing a post to motivate myself to keep moving forward. For frequent readers, I apologize if this is bordering on petulant, but clearly I’m working through some shit, so bear with me a bit longer. I need my mental Hanz and Franz to pump (clap) me up! 

My plate is not getting any smaller: I seemingly keep piling stuff on my shoulders as if my middle name were Atlas. There’s family stuff, house repairs, work, pet care, the blog, and I’ve been trying desperately to finish a fully edited draft of my first novel before the end of this month.  I’m pulling myself in too many directions at once and expecting myself to be able to do it at a breakneck pace. Perhaps if I were independently wealthy these goals and obligations would be reasonable, but I’m barely scraping the bottom of the middle class barrel. My eyes are perpetually bigger than my actual ability to get these things done and it’s freaking me out man!

John Lennon got it right near the end of his life: In his wonderful song “Watching the Wheels,” from his last album Double Fantasy, he touches on a number of subjects: relevance, being a trend setter/leader, and receiving unwanted opinions from friends, to name a few. Above and beyond those topics, my favorite thing that he repeatedly touches on in the song is that he “just had to let it go,” in reference to all of the pressure and urgency to get things done. That’s where I’m at currently. I’ve got all these different things that I want to accomplish, and truthfully no ironclad path to accomplish them, and you know what, I’ve just got to let that shit go. I can’t weigh myself down with the “when are you going to get this done” mentality when I can spend more time and positive energy actually getting things done, incrementally  at my own speed until I complete a project: one thing at a time. There are no hard timetables for what I am trying to do, and putting that kind of stress on myself on a daily basis is only making me miserable. So I let it go. I’ll get things done when I can. I juggle a lot in my day to day routine, not the least of which being a husband, father, and holding a soul stealing full time job with a sizable commute. I work hard on my passions… but I only have so much time each day and most nights I’m doing good to scrape more than 3 hours of sleep, so you know what? To heck with it. No stress, no pressure, no fuss. My novels, my comics, my screenplays, and any other little pipe dreams I have will get done when I can get them done and not a second earlier… unless of course someone wants to pay me to finish them, and then they’ll get done real quick. So if you are a publisher or an agent, get me a deal with a hefty paycheck and I’ll spin the wheels real quick to churn out the content. Until then, I’ll be loving my life and pursuing my dreams at a slow pace, so as to not get so disheartened by the failures that make me feel like I want to give up all the time. I just had to let it go…JL

In the meantime, listen to Lennon tell you what’s up:

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