ellenoutloud's Blog

Somewhere between my mind and reality lies Nirvana. I love to hang there.

It’s that place between the floor model of the brand-spanking new Schwinn 10-speed and the unassembled bicycle you go home with. It’s the end-date of the fourteen week diet plan before you start to lose the seventeen pounds. For example.

It’s the flash forward to the result before the work begins. I like to call it my happy place.

Which is why I had so much fun with NANOWRIMO back in October. I had deleted about a month’s worth of emails on the topic thinking the acronym had to be somebody’s spam. It looked a lot like what comes up in my Excel spreadsheets when my formulas don’t work.

Anyway, once I inadvertently opened one and saw it was about a cool “write a book in a month” plan, I was all over it! I spent a good couple of weeks googling it, playing around a couple of dedicated websites, enrolling, signing up; I even picked out a spectacular journal specifically to capture any random thoughts and brilliance. Wow! I could write a book in thirty days. Imagine that!

Anticipation.

Looking forward.

Imagining the outcome.

It’s a lot more fun to picture the size ______ jeans (pick your own number) you are finally going to wear than it is to try them on or try to reduce enough to try them on. I for one like all the foreplay before the revelation in the department store mirror.

That said, I’m going to pause here and applaud everyone who takes the plunge and does the hard work to accomplish a goal – the folks that undertake the day after day after day of a challenge after the new wears off and the hard part kicks in. The NANOWRIMO writers and the diets and bad-habit breakers everywhere.

It sure is easier imagining the journey than to take it. Reality is a heckofa roadblock between imagination and results.

Cue Mr. Roark!