On this morning that has surreptitiously slid on into early afternoon, I am clutching a cup of coffee and letting the warmth through the thick mug make my hands hot and thereby my body warm, while I wait for the words to come. They come in fits and starts…ideas that seem good and look wan on the page until I backspace them into almost having never been and wait quietly for the new, good things to emerge. I reach for the mug again, suspecting that perhaps it is the heat of the muddy water that will fuel the words, and if the past is any indication, my suspicions are probably on to something.
This is one of those days that has emerged from a tunnel of crazy intensity and obligations in all its nubile simplicity. I don’t have to get anything done today, and the lightness of the day disarms me a little after the onslaught of days rife with heaviness and requirements. In a strange way it is welcomingly unsettling, and I am prone to put requirements on it myself so that it doesn’t just float away, lost.
But I am tired, and stacking weights of purpose onto the center of the moments is in and of itself more than I can do today. And I have to remind myself to be grateful for the lightness. To remember that these days are just as good and right as the ones when I am hustlin’. In fact, maybe they are better.
These are the days I used to wander in and out of with ease, when they were my norm, the heavy and purposeful days standouts in a sea of easy being. I take a moment to remember, to feel my legs on the chair, my breathe in this space, my soul not running, but resting.
I recently read an article about burnout and it resonated with me and reverberated along the back of a life I have built of hustlin’ like sabre tooth tigers are casing my retirement account and the sun seems to only sit in the sky for 23 minutes out of every day.
It is on these days that I turn to writing. And I find that kind of funny because I write for work. I teach writing for work. I work with writers for work. And yet, when I am tired or I am trying to remind myself to sit with the quiet or breathe, I write.
There are rows and rows of book on the topic of writing, but I think it is interesting to think about what writing does—at least it is for me.
There is a part of me that wants to do one of those 30 days of thinking about writing things or 15 days of tweeting or sharing my creative process on instagram in order to create a buzz and something to follow.
I, however, am not one of those people. I consider it a win when I brush my teeth twice in one day and even that necessary regularity is a bit much for me sometimes.
That being said, I do want to investigate what writing means for me and what the act of writing does, but I think it would work better for me to do it when I feel inclined. Maybe I’ll post three days in a row and then maybe not for a week or two. But I will post. And I can commit to using a consistent hashtag. You have to know what you can do and honor that.
So here’s to a mishmash series of writing about writing whenever I want to, outside of temporal bounds, and organized only by two consistent hashtags #writingis and #bawriter.
I hope you follow along, and if you’d like to talk about what writing is for you too, then please, by all means, join in, and hashtag away.
