Well here it comes. Short days, cold nights, and the persistent feeling I am in a winter holding pattern. It’s actually a time for me to get things done, but the core feature of winter is trying to find a rhythm without creating monotony. People used to call it “cabin fever” but our need to sound college-educated has us calling it “Seasonal Affective Disorder.”
Yeah, it’s not really smart calling it SAD when you look at people learning Latin 100yrs ago, but here we are. For the record, I don’t use either term. It doesn’t need a name. It’s a bigger issue than being bored; it has more to do with finding something useful to do with your time, but not having it feel ultimately worthless except as a way to mark time.
So where am I going with all that?
Step one of any winter for me is to find a place to hole up — to break the rhythm of coffee > ride > set up camp > sleep > repeat. I’ve got that now, having found a room for rent right on the USA/Mexico border. Neither Sonora or Arizona follow Daylight Savings Time, but the sun still goes down early because of the season.
The upshot to that is you need to get up and use those hours. If you’ve ever had a motorcycle as your only form of transportation you’ll know that grocery shopping is constant. And when the sun goes down during a desert winter, you do not want to be out on a motorcycle.
It also means long nights that can cause the mindless, timeless, grayness, which can have you falling asleep at 5pm or 5am, because the sun seems to be down forever. And that’s where finding rhythm can save you. Take a class. Join a gym. Create a timeframe to work or not work.
My natural disposition is to just wake up, work on some writing, and eventually get up and find some coffee…maybe some food too. If you do that without structure, you can end up in bed 22hrs a day. Maybe working diligently, maybe napping, maybe reading for pleasure, or for research. It all becomes the same thing: Groundhog Day.
Solutions
Yes, obviously, “well just don’t do that.” Of course, in action, the only way to not default to old habits is to create new ones. That’s a topic that launched 1,000 self-help books, seminars, programs, and assorted miracle cures. Clearly it does not come naturally to most people.
Fine and well. I know I have to work on my book, which still sits at only about 10% complete after nearly a year; I can’t take 10 years to finish this thing. Create work time, and limit how much of it you have, so you need to get work done while you’re working. That’s a hard one for most people to understand. We’re used to jobs that have more hours than there are hours of work, so we learn to “pretend to be busy.” It’s a pandemic of the post-industrial era.
We also expect ourselves to be hyper-productive, so putting in 12-hour days is something to brag about instead of recognizing you are inefficient if you need to do a task that many hours for months on end. So, block off an hour or two to write, take an hour or two to work on something like house chores or working on the bike or taking a walk.
From there, back to writing. This is a well-established behavior that many successful people have explained in one way or the other. In fact, a study once looked into grad students and how much time they put into their thesis. The shock finding was the people who were still working on it after 5-7 years worked really hard.
Intrinsic and extrinsic pressures
See, the people who got it done in a few years and had moved on to post-grad work or the workforce had balance. They went to the movies with friends,played racquet ball, visited their family, and worked part-time jobs. They were busy enough with other things that they looked forward to being able to work on their thesis. People who were years behind looked at the thesis with dread, because they were so far behind they’d have to face the reality if they worked on their thesis.
And of course, they’d marathon for 20hrs to try and catch up, further reinforcing the dread of working on it the next time. This is plenty obvious while sitting here explaining it, but when you’re doing it to yourself it looks different. For me, people often tell me what a great writer I am, so sitting down and working on the book brings forth a “be brilliant, NOW” mandate in my mind.
Blog posts like this I hammer out in an hour or so, not worrying about even proof-reading them most times. It can actually take me longer to upload pictures and write their captions and alternate-text than it takes to write the post. But usually I look forward to these posts, as well as free-writing on my typewriter.
That’s a place where I can just write, fleshing out ideas without needing to drill them down and rephrase them, spell-check them, and make things flow smoothly. With no “be brilliant, NOW” mandate, there’s no pressure, and no dread. Creating that for yourself is a blessing, as most of us learn as children to respond to outside pressure.
We don’t decide to clean our room or eat our veggies or get ready for school without (more than one) gentle nudge… and usually a threat or two. That’s an external (extrinsic) motivation. Finding a natural motivation (intrinsic) — one where we choose to do simply because we choose to do so — removes pressures and makes things feel like they are flowing naturally, effortlessly.
The here and now
But enough of that. This isn’t a self-help article. I’m not about to unveil my 5-tiered Power Pyramid of Progress© or anything. Don’t expect a Powerpoint slide to accompany this. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are deep enough for now anyway. This is here and now. I have found a place for my winter, umm, hibernation? No, but not working in the coal mines either. Thing, yeah… my winter thing.
I doubt I’ll have much interesting to say about in these next several weeks though. I firstly have a LOT of maintenance to do on the bike, the setting up of a rhythm, and only then can I dig my other bike out of the garage. That’ll be the toy I can go explore the area with, since all the paved roads are horribly straight out here.
With the DR650 free from summer slumber, I’ll be able to take some dirt roads into the hills, the ghost towns, the old ranches and Indian camps and abandoned mines. Shorter trips heavier on history than stories of people met or museums visited. Probably fewer pictures too though, but the desert does offer up some good views if you poke around enough.
I’ll also have an update on how my attempts to create a rhythm are going, and maybe a review of the Sidepony Express Music Festival, which fills Bisbee up with bands from all over the Southwest (and the country). I’m not too interested in writing about music though, or taking live music photos. I’m sure a story will come out of it somehow though.
Stay tuned.
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Johnny Killmore 