Distracted

I haven’t written in the last couple of months.

I travelled home, spent time with my family, attended a wedding, and had a wonderful time catching up with people. Somewhere along the way, writing quietly slipped out of my routine. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time. I just had too many things competing for my attention. The more I stayed away from writing, the harder it became to return. Momentum, once broken, is surprisingly difficult to rebuild.

I assumed I would naturally get back to writing once I returned. But that never happened. Even after life settled down, I couldn’t seem to find the same rhythm again. The hardest part was breaking the inertia and getting back to the routine.

I think we live in a world built around distractions. Being expected to respond the moment a message arrives, answering calls instantly, having the television running in the background, listening to music while working—it has all become so normal that we rarely question it. In fact, not participating almost feels like we’re missing out.

I realized that nothing was really stopping me—I had simply gotten used to being distracted.

I noticed it whenever I sat down to read or write. My mind would immediately jump to messages I hadn’t replied to, things I needed to charge, emails to check, or random tasks that suddenly felt very important. I always felt busy, but I wasn’t really focused.

Maybe that’s what distractions do best. They don’t stop us from doing what we love. They quietly replace it with things that feel more urgent.

So today, before writing this, I put my phone away, turned off notifications, left my smartwatch outside, and flipped over my sand timer. For the next few minutes, I wanted my attention to belong to just one thing. It wasn’t some grand productivity experiment. Just uninterrupted time to stay with my thoughts and develop that into something meaningful.

The words didn’t come as easily as they used to. My sentences felt clumsy, and I was definitely out of practice. But the thoughts were real, and that was good enough to start writing again.

Distractions have woven themselves so seamlessly into our lives that escaping them no longer happens by accident. It has to be intentional. And perhaps that’s the first habit worth rebuilding.