I love a little Monday Motivation.
Finding quotes and affirmations for reflection and inspiration gets my week off to a good start.
I can’t remember where I first came across this bit of Monday motivation. It must have been 2+ years ago when I first saw this Annie Dillard quote. I found it during a time when I was feeling somewhat discontent with my life. These words helped me to internalize the simple truth that my life is, at its essence, a finite stream of hours that only I can fill. I didn’t want to build a stream of stress filled hours. I was motivated to make some changes.
I realized that I had more agency in how I spent my hours than I was exercising. This agency often hid behind negativity and busyness but with practice and effort it could be found. My journey to more mindful living has been far from instant. The difficulty in minding my hours and minutes was in large part inspiration for this blog. I keep journals and blog to remind myself that how I live the small moments will add up to how I have lived my life.
I was unfamiliar with the writing of Annie Dillard, so I sought the source of this quote which comes from her book The Writing Life. In The Writing Life, Dillard gives us a vivid glimpse into the internal life of being a professional writer.
The full quote reads –
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”
If you want to be a writer, painter, or gardener then you have to set aside time to write, paint, garden etc. Whatever we say we want to do, whether we want to exercise, read more, have better relationships or even just have more unstructured time, we have to plan for it. If we don’t, our lives risk becoming a string of hours that we cannot remember.
Annie Dillard goes on to say, “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.” So define your own “good life” and structure your hours accordingly because,
