The thing about discipline is that sometimes it isn't easy and requires effort; who could have predicted that?

This week, something unusual has happened: I have absolutely nothing to say.  It’s not that it’s been a very busy week – I’ve done a couple of workshops which have gone well and I’m prepping for a large project that I’ll be working on during May – and it’s not like I’ve had no time to write this entry.  It’s just that I cannot think of a single topic on which to write.

Which gives me a bit of a problem because, when I started this blog, several years ago now, I promised myself that I would produce a blog a week unless there was a very good reason why I couldn’t.  So far, over that period, I think the only time I’ve not posted an entry has been when I was out of the country.  That, I felt, was a good enough reason: not being able the think of anything to write is not a good enough reason.

So as I sat at the computer, staring at the blank screen, feeling the pressure of a deadline, I started to make excuses for myself.  Perhaps I could pretend that I’d had a busy week – in other words, perhaps I could lie to you and use that as an excuse for no post.  Probably, I told myself, no one’s reading this anyway and no one will care if there’s no entry this week – the siren voice of my low self-esteem, looking to give me a way out.

Those two options were certainly seductive and I was very tempted but I was reminded of the story of a couple celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary.  At their party, the husband is asked how he and his wife have managed to stay happily together for sixty years whilst all around them marriages and relationships have failed.  The old man pauses and says, “Sixty years ago, on the eve of our wedding, my wife and I made an agreement.  We decided that, as the man, I would make all the big, life-changing decisions and that she would make all the little, humdrum decisions.  For sixty years we’ve kept to that arrangement and in sixty years, there have been no big decisions!”

Life’s like that; sometimes there are big, life-changing decisions – I’m in the process of making some at the moment – but most of the time the decisions are humdrum.  We make them without thought to the consequences – almost without being conscious of making them at all.  Writing this blog was a little decision; you wouldn’t know if I’d lied to you and not posted a blog and quite possibly no one would care.  No one would know that I’d broken that commitment I made to myself; except me.

Sometimes in life, when inspiration doesn’t come, when things are difficult, what gets you through is discipline.  Making a decision and sticking to it, regardless of how difficult it is.  Consciously making a little, humdrum decision to do nothing more significant than doing what you said you’d do.