The paradoxical nature of why it takes a Herculean effort to begin the very thing you feel you are born to do.

You will always find requisite time and mojo in a day to do things that enthral you. If you don’t, then those things don’t enthral you enough. Think, eating oats for breakfast or going for a run or waking up earlier than your alarm. Then think about the extra half hour of telly before bed, that surplus glass of wine and the extended walk you endured simply to accompany the pretty stranger you met on the bus between stops.

 Depending on your persona, your mental state, the strength of your will and the loquaciousness you possess, either of those scenarios enthral you. If however, you exist in a fragile and holistically vacuous tedium, then neither will. This tedium, highly comforting in its passivity and far-reaching in its plangent occupation of the once vivid mind space, is highly personal. Mine tends to take the form of half written sentences within a grandiose yet incomplete blueprint for a screenplay, an overflowing kitchen sink left to stew in its own wake, patchy relationships that descend into apathy, indifference and worst of all, the onset of a prosaic, symbiotic state. What brings this tedium on? Two-parts indifference, two-parts slovenliness, a hint of superciliousness and a sprinkle of pessimism, served in seething cynicism ought to do it. Darkness, like unbridled optimism or emasculating love, is overrated. And yet, for the emotionally gullible (who would ever have thought I would be this) it exudes an alluring glow. The dark side beckons.

So, how does one clear up the cob-webs and start over? How does one de-evolutionalize? Or shed the years of scepticism in return for the ability to find seemingly inane things enthralling again? Celebrating mediocrity perhaps isn't quite the curse I made it out to be. But, at the risk of sounding nauseatingly augural, there is bound to be light at the end of this particular tunnel. Or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Or a/an insert-a-popular-and-attractive-object-here at the end of a/an insert-a-man made-or-natural-manifestation-of-architecture here. For me, my mattress at the end of the cliff is to assimilate enough scatterbrained frivolities from the walks of life and somehow orchestrate all of them into a cogent document. Or writing, as normal people call it.  

Which brings me neatly back to my central theme:  The paradoxical nature of why it takes a Herculean effort to begin the very thing you feel you are born to do. And my answer is that it doesn't. It doesn't require effort as it’s an entirely organic process that cannot be stymied by the state of one’s mind. Yes, occasional feelings of angst, loneliness and solitude help colour and mould the organic process, but not change its intrinsic qualities. And that, either because it’s true or through its placebo, is enough to reinvigorate my hitherto derelict mind out of a self induced stupor and on to some semblance of action.

Oh wait, I've said this before.