Welcome back everyone.  In my last article, we talked about how easy it is to get caught up in reading (or writing) about Personal Development - without ever really DOING anything else.  I created an assignment, which was essentially to take two days off from "Personal Development", and to spend all the time you would have spent Personal Developmentizing actually doing something, anything, that you love to do.  If you want to get to the point where most of your life is devoted to doing those things that you love to do, you actually have to give some energy to those things, so that they'll grow.  Absolutely I love writing about personal development (and dog training).  There are other things that I love to do (and which I'd like to spend more time on), so my past two days were devoted to the most important of them: writing music.

I was a little nervous.  While I've written about 5 or 6 songs in the past 9 months (since Dash was born) - and that's more than I'd written in the preceding ten years - I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to "just write" if I made myself do it.  I've always relied on inspiration to strike - which is probably why I've written so little over the past decade.  Still, I was dedicated to the assignment, and excited to see what the weekend would bring.

As it turns out, you simply have to make room for inspiration, and be patient.  Making room was difficult.  It was unbelievably tempting to just turn on the computer, check e-mail, read dailykos - anything other than face "the music".  I spent some time outside (with family and alone), just taking in the fresh air and letting nature work her magic.  Taking in the crisp air and the fall foliage helped me relax about the experiment, so upon returning to the house I grabbed my notebook and my guitar, and just started playing to see what would happen.

On Saturday I wrote about 2/3 of a song.  I was pretty excited about it, but I got stuck one one of the verses, decided to take a break, and when I came back to the song (on Sunday) I had completely forgotten the melody of the chorus (note to self: next time record the durn thing on my little digital recorder thingy!).  That was discouraging, but I figured that if I couldn't remember the chorus it probably wasn't all that great, so I decided to start over again with a completely new song.  Here's the result, for your listening pleasure (you can click the little blue arrow to just play the tune in your browser, or you can download the file to your computer by right-clicking on the link):

It's Easy

Sometimes nothing will get our son to sleep except holding him close, slowly bouncing up and down, and singing a lullaby or two.  Needless to say, when it comes to wanting my son to sleep well (and more often) - I have TONS of inspiration...and plenty of incentive to boot.  Let me know if it works for any of the chitlins in your life (or for your own insomnia, for that matter).

If YOU took part in the experiment, please let me know, either in the comments or through my contact page - I'd love to hear what you did with your two days.  Also, feel free to check in with my Music page, where I'll be adding tunes as I record them, for your listening pleasure.