Yesterday was Sunday, and Mother’s Day, and perhaps the most beautiful day we’ve had in Maine yet this year. Temperatures in the 70s, sunshine, everything you could ask for. My apartment, which tends to be a little cold during the winter, has actually been overheating. I forgot it did that. This winter was especially brutal. I’ve always lived in places with cold and snow in the colder months, but this year it seemed to just keep coming. I’m still a little paranoid about this Spring thing. I don’t quite trust it. Warm weather? Us? Must be some kind of set-up. Where’s the catch?
Yesterday was too beautiful to stay inside, so Mr. Huntington and I took the ferry to Peaks Island, the most popular of the islands in Casco Bay right off the coast of Portland. My roommate Brackett met us at the ferry and gave us a quick tour; his family has a cottage on the island and he happened to be out there the afternoon we decided to take our impromptu trip. After walking around some rocks by the sea and getting a tour of Brackett’s cottage, we walked down Island Ave to the ferry landing and sat in the sunshine and ate ice cream while waited for the next boat back into town.
The rest of the day was taken up with dinner, and laundry, and not much else.
What do you do when it’s a beautiful day, and you’d rather be outside than at your computer desk writing?
Is there value in disciplining yourself to the desk, to the work? What sacrifices do you make to further your craft, and where do you draw your lines? How do you navigate the boundary between distraction and things you need, things that feed you?
Grace Makley 
I do think there’s value in disciplining yourself to the work, but the work goes better if you also allow yourself exceptions for exquisitley beautiful days that must be spent outdoors. I need deadlines and commitments or I just keep putting things off forever — even things I really want to do. It’s frustrating when the thing you’re procrastinating about is something you love but, for some reason, you’re not doing it. I guess you just have to know yourself well enough to know whether what you really need, this very moment, is to do the work or to allow yourself a break from the work. It’s definitely a difficult balance.