Not Losing Focus

It so happens at times that life doesn’t go the way you want it, doesn’t it? Some good, some bad, and some worse. Tragedies, misfortunes, frustrations, and tiny nuisances. Small piles of crap you step on, and large seas of piss you fall in here and there.

Something happened last month which certainly cannot be called a tragedy, but a “tiny nuisance” wouldn’t exactly describe it either. No, nobody died, nobody lost a leg, or even 1 quarter of sanity. No, I just lost whole bunch of data.

I’m sure it happened to all of us, in larger and smaller degree. It’s annoying, especially if there are images you cannot get back, or it is written project you were in the middle of. I was working on two stories, 50 pages on one, and over 100 pages on the other. Ouch.

Well, the data recovery techs couldn’t explain what exactly happened to my USBs after they worked on them for two months. Well, I was told they cannot get it back either. Well, I was recommended to get better data storing devices.

I was walking home from the shop, thinking of how I am going to get it all back. After all, giving up on either of the stories was not an option. The smaller story, I edited the whole thing two months prior, so most of it was still fresh in memory. I could recreate it fast, and then go to recreate the bigger one. No surrender.

And here’s another important thing. OK, I lost the entire story (except for, ironically, latest written chapters). OK, I was about to finish it and move to another one, another big story I was working on while the techs were working on recovering the other two. OK, I am going to leave that one alone, and get to working on this one. And it’s gonna be good and fun.

Yes, good and fun, because my passion is not finishing stories. My passion is writing and developing stories. Recreating this story will be exactly that.

I then realized I saved most of the bigger story in the email versions, sending it for feedback to a friend. That meant I only had to worry about a couple of chapters for that one. And worrying doesn’t work anyway, so I just went to work bringing stories back to life and organizing things.

Couple days after, that situation made me think of my living sober.

What’s the connection? The thing is, I originally quit drinking to do exactly that, stop drinking. But then the focus changed.

I saw how much my life has become better, how much there was to it, besides the grumbling and pushing forward. There was more enjoyment. There was more to see of what was to accomplish besides just proving others wrong. And there was excitement of going and doing that. There turned out to be more full-hearted laughter than sneering. There was even more love and nice surprises than I experienced prior. There were way more books to read, and more music to listen to, and more shows to attend. There were more wonderful quiet times to appreciate and more conversations to engage in.

And so I stopped focusing on simply staying sober. Instead, I focused on having sober living the means and the good, fun, passionate life being the end, as well as all of the process. Without being sober I wouldn’t have all the good that I have. But just thinking of being sober all the time would probably give me a rather tunnel-vision of a perspective on life, people, attitudes, and dreams to make true.

So I’m not losing focus on writing stories for the fun of creating them, and when one is finished, I go to write another one. And as I walk through life, having fun (and some shit too, and occasionally a sea of piss to swim through), I do what I did for the last twelve years (sober, yes, because I do not want to welcome back any, even the small bits of insanity of the old times.) Yet my focus is not just sobriety, but a good life that sobriety and fellowship allowed me to enjoy.

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the image was copied from

https://www.success.com/blog/5-questions-i-ask-myself-when-i-start-losing-focus

thanks.