Unable to sleep last night. Woke up and worked on some images and polished this blog post.

The blog is becoming frustrating to me. I am trying to understand the reason for this.

When I started, I would happily spend hours working on a blog post, performing endless polishing and revision. This activity filled much of the day; posting to the blog left little time for anything else.

The activity of writing posts is in many respects very similar to the work involved in drafting insurance company submissions — both constitute an immersive attachment to a narrow range of activity. When I struggled with the insurance company submissions there was no time for anything else. When I worked on the blog there was less of a struggle but still there was little time for anything else. This was especially true of the first month of blog posts as I was prepping posts up to a week before they appeared on the blog. But the time demands were comparable to making a written submission.

This month I am making a concerted effort to attend to domestic chores. In the course of this attempt I encounter my physical limits in a way that was not evident when working on the computer. This encounter with limits and deficits gives rise first to frustration and then despair at my inadequacies, and my seeming lack of progress ( I keep telling myself that I am improving despite there being limited evidence of that improvement. I not only want to improve, I have a need to believe in the fact I am improving ).

I am fully aware that time spent polishing kitchen pots does not do much to advance my situation. No one will care if the pots gleam, or not; even I am unconcerned with the appearance of my pots. They are functional containers and they transmit heat; that is all that I require of them. They do not need to function as eye candy.

So spending a few hours in pot polishing would be a pleasant interlude but will achieve very little. On reflection, I realize that polishing text shares a number of characteristics with polishing pots. Instead of burnishing a metal surface, I burnish words and paragraphs. Both activities are restricted in scope, both are highly repetitive, both reward effort, both require few decisions, both deliver a sense of achievement (nice post, nice pots), both are immersive, both are self contained, both have limited relevance to the issue of how I will support myself in the world or fully repair the effects of the accident. Both activities, pots and posts, provide a means to engage in an activity that diverts me from my real world problems.

These thoughts came to mind yesterday as I sorted documents. I became frustrated and upset. My immediate response was to abandon the paper shuffle and do something else.

Since I abandoned the task in midstream, I now confront an even worse sprawl of paper. I need to pick up where I left off and clear up the chaos.

I am not completely clear on the thought I am trying to develop here; I am groping for a better understanding. The crux of the issue is the distinction between real-world physicality  (and the concrete problems provoked by that physicality) and a redacted virtual world which obscures and cloaks those same concrete problems while giving a sense of problem mitigation and resolution. Writing these words changes nothing.

Update

I have written here about resisting the urge to polish pots. I had a further thought —  this urge to perform menial activities is akin to the alcoholic’s urge to drink. This may be an inappropriate comparison but I think it has some validity.

My response to physical world insult is to find a refuge in which I will not be insulted. This mandates a relatively small scope of activity, a limited pursuit within which it is possible to effect absolute control. Pot, polish, and rag, constitutes such a constrained activity. Computer, text editor, and thoughts, reflect a similar set of constraints.

The key difference is that text creation has a meta-function and provokes reflexive understanding. This is not true of pot walloping.