reprioritising

Last night I sat down at the piano for the first time in about 1-2 months. Before that, I had been practising less and less due to a combination of being busy with other things and being lazy. Last night I decided that I had to recommit.

I’m certainly not at the stage of being able to return to piano after a long absence and pick it up again easily. Indeed, I’m not sure that I’ll ever get to that stage, since I don’t have a natural aptitude for music, but I’ll be darned if I don’t try. I hadn’t even looked at sheet music in these last several weeks, so I had to start from the start, playing scales to become reacquainted with the notes.

What I realised last night — or re-realised, because this is certainly nothing new — is that I need to be more consistent with my piano practice if I want to improve and be able to play with any level of proficiency. It’s a thought that has been gnawing away at me for a while, but I’ve been sweeping it under the proverbial rug instead of doing something about it.

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near miss

I very nearly didn’t get a blog post done for this week. I did think about letting this one slip by. After all, there’s nothing forcing me to continue this post-per-week thing.

But I just couldn’t. I’m not sure what it is — Pride? Stubbornness? Fear? Why can’t I just let this go? If there is one week in many that I don’t feel like writing, or forget to blog, surely there is no terrible ripple effect on the universe, right?

Anyway, it’s less than two hours before Sunday ticks over to Monday, the start of another week. I’ve made it before the deadline yet again.

Hopefully next week-end will be less busy, and more full of writing inspiration. Or, who knows, maybe next week will be the week I give the whole thing a miss.

the recap that wasn’t

I’ve been considering doing a sort of recap post about things I’ve blogged about this year. I thought about writing something to highlight various posts that have meant a lot to me, or that I felt were important, or that were just quite popular. But then I thought that that sort of post seemed kind of pointless, since my archives are easily searchable, and I’m not really sure which posts to include anyway. (And who would read a whole post about other posts?)

When I did a quick browse through before, I pulled up a few candidates perhaps worth re-blogging, perhaps worth a mention, but I think the one post that I’m most glad about writing was a simple sound.

That post didn’t have the greatest number of views, comments or likes, but, for me, it was one of the more significant things I wrote this year. In addition to all my Meditations posts, that post captures the sort of mentality I want to keep with me in the coming year. But not just for New Year – I want to carry it into tomorrow, the next day, and so forth.

interest pays

I’ve been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. It was prompted by an article I read somewhere. I think it was on Hello Giggles but I’ve been searching for it, and can’t find it again. Maybe it was on someone’s blog, or another site…

Anyway, I think whoever wrote the article was writing about their parents’ divorce, and they were trying to shed some light on the real reason their relationship ended. The article then applied this to relationships in general, and the point was that a lot of relationships end not because people stop loving or caring about one another, but because they lose interest in the other person or the relationship.

let’s catch up …maybe

These last few weeks have been pretty hectic. Everything’s a bit of a blur. I’ve been doing a lot of overtime at work because of this new arrangement in place involving other hospitals. (Can’t say too much, of course, because of privacy reasons or whatever.) I just worked six consecutive days – some of which were 11-12 hour days – and I am quite exhausted, but also not. I think I’ve just been running on adrenaline all week because I only had a total of maybe 3 cups of coffee and one cup of tea the whole week (and the most recent two beverages were probably unnecessary anyway).

Well, maybe we’ll call it adrenaline and fear/panic. There have been many times these last few weeks when I’ve felt like I was working as if my life depended on it. It’s like a fear of death (i.e. consequences) or fear of God (i.e. management – except I’m not really afraid of management; they’ve been very supportive).

selling words

Like a lot of people who blog or write in some form on a regular basis I’ve long dreamt of being paid to write. I can now happily say that that dream has now been fulfilled (and it was, in fact, one of the things on my Accomplished List). It’s definitely been a very interesting experience, so, naturally, I’m going to write about it here.