No, that’s not a reference to Yellowstone. But it is a good metaphor for what’s been happening the last few weeks.
“Back in the saddle” is an idiom from around the 1930s, meant for horse jockeys who returned to riding after an injury. They were literally ‘back in the saddle’, racing once they had recovered. And while I don’t have anything to do with horses, I can relate to the meaning of the phrase: returning to something after a long absence.
Ever since I was a kid, I had some sort of written work on the go. I kept a regular journal on my computer for a few years here and there, and I had a notebook of poems and ideas that usually stayed in my purse. I wrote short stories. I read a lot. And in the last three or four years, I have fallen out almost completely.
There are a lot of reasons why this happened. I’m tired after my 9 to 5, and I’m a lot more busy now that we have a house we’re fixing up, and I have more social obligations, and I try and spend time with my parents, I gotta make supper, and the list can go on forever. And ever. And ever.
To my mind, all of these seem like really good reasons for slacking off. Who isn’t tired after work? Who wouldn’t try and make their house nicer to live in? But from an outside point of view looking in, I can be perfectly honest.
Do I really have no time to write at all? Like, at all? What about the 20 minute Tiktok doom scroll most mornings? Or the Netflix binges? How about all that time in the evenings, getting supper figured out and done when I could’ve prepped it on the weekend? Did I really need to spend an hour and a half wandering No Frills, looking for things to buy? Or could I have made a damn list, knocked it off, and got out of there?
I’m not trying to state the obvious here, but it really pays to set yourself up for success.
In his TED Talk, Stephen Durneier talks about “marginal improvements”—making small changes to your routines to make it easier to reach a goal. He uses the example of using his commute to work to learn German. He downloads an entire course onto his iPod (when iPods were a thing) but goes a step further by deleting all his music so he can’t switch back when he gets bored. He sets up a daily routine to make it impossible not to learn German.
This might seem like a little much. That’s fine. From over here, I see a process that achieves the goal, and avoids wasting energy on fighting with your own impulses and making decisions. Mr. Durneier says that he’s “not a disciplined person”; rather, he just found workarounds for his own habits and tendencies.
And that takes a little bit of self-reflection and honesty. And honestly, I haven’t been setting myself up very well. Call it overwhelm, anxiety, or simply being disorganized, but my routines haven’t been running smoothly since I graduated. Because, well, life happens.
But I’m pretty determined to learn how to navigate around that. Years are going by quicker than they used to, and like Mr. Duneier, I am not a disciplined person.
So I’ll make some marginal improvements, and they’re not going to be easy.
