Writing vs Gardening

So the wife and I were having a conversation last night. Every now and then I get feeling a tad apathetic. Hard to describe, but what I mean is that I just feel pretty meh. Not happy, not sad. Not excited, not depressed. Just . . . neutral. Anyway, DKC was saying how much she enjoyed gardening, and how that helps her to feel more chipper about things. Not exactly her words, but the general sentiment is right. Anyway, the point is that she was wondering if I didn’t want to pick up some sort of hobby that I really enjoyed that would help me feel not so meh. I thought about this for a bit, and then explained that I had a hobby that I really enjoyed, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that. Here’s how I explained it:

Imagine that you’d been gardening every day for the past seven years. In this amount of time, you’d gotten some pretty good crops in. And each time you harvested, you looked them over and felt really good about the work you’d done. You piled all the produce up from one harvest, and you carted it down to the local farmer’s market. There, the professional gardeners looked it over for a bit, then explained that your harvest wasn’t quite up to snuff. You looked down at your harvest and saw they were right–all their points were valid. So you took the harvest back and decided to try again. And again. And again. You still enjoy gardening, but there are times that it gets a tad old–all that gardening and no recognition. It’s the same way with my writing. There are ups and downs. At times, I feel great about it. At others, I feel meh. This doesn’t mean I want to stop writing, but it does explain why something I love to do can get old now and then.

I think the explanation made sense to DKC.

(And on a completely unrelated note, I watched JCVD yesterday. Three stars. It’s a movie in which Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself. He’s going through a bitter divorce, can’t get good movies to come his way, and he’s short on cash. Then he finds himself in the middle of a robbery. Intriguing movie, with an awesome acting turn by Van Damme. Really impressive. There were some slow spots, but it was a good movie. Surprising.)