Do I hafta?

This blog is supposed to be about wasting time, not about motivational stuff, but all my responsibilities are seriously cutting into my time-wasting, so I need to review an inspiration I had way back in high-school but have kind of forgotten about for a while.

Here it is, my big breakthrough:

You don’t have to do anything.

I’m trying to shift my thinking, and remember this. I don’t have to do anything. There are things I want to do. There I things I need to do, in order to make the things I want to do possible. But there is nothing I have to do.

It’s just a trick of thinking, but it really helps me to focus my efforts in a positive way. So this morning, I need to do the laundry, because I want to eliminate that stinky smell from the mudroom. Also I want to wear jeans again tomorrow. And I want my children to have clean underwear.

I don’t have to do laundry, I WANT to do laundry! Yippee!

Ok, so not always such a dramatic effect--“results are not typical.” But amazingly this morning I discovered a new dimension to my “need to/want to” philosophy. I was on Facebook, mindlessly playing Bejeweled Blitz, as I often do, and I thought, “I sure don’t need to do this. And actually, I don’t really want to do this.” And then I did the unthinkable. I stopped playing! And I decided I wanted to write instead.

Thinking about this a little more as I did my laundry. I know it sounds too simplistic. Can everything you do really be traced back to doing what you want to? Today, I really want to take that crummy Nikon digital camera that’s only a few months old, and cram it down Ashton Kutcher’s throat. But then, I also want to continue to live in my home, not in prison, so I guess I don’t want to do that after all.

It does work!