Posted on:Dec 12 2021
During a recent mental-inventory-of-my-life exercise, driven in part by cold, dark December and a blah feeling of what I guess I’d call ‘loss,’ it didn’t take too long to realize the missing piece. It’s writing!
Silly Robin, of course it’s writing. I’ve loved this form of creative expression forever — there’s a box of proof (thanks to my mom and my nana) chock-full of letters, elementary school book reports, spelling tests and handwriting practice, birthday and get well cards, all sorts of hilarious, heartwarming treasures.
Fast forward through myriad mind-numbing junior high and high school writing assignments to college and a freshman seminar called, "Critical Thinking and Writing"...at the time I found it terrifying and eye-opening, down the road about twenty years, I "aha" recognized it for the game-changing, next-levelling course it was.
(Funny how that goes, isn't it? How long it can take for the piece to fall beautifully into place, for it all to make so. much. sense. Reminds me that a big part of life is timing, things can't and shouldn't be rushed, stay steadily in the game and be patient patient patient.)
A few years after Crit Think, there was the graduate school course on children’s literature - our final project was to write and illustrate a children’s book (in my treasure chest of course!). English was my favorite subject to teach. (I’m old-school, it was called Language Arts back then and, among other things, I routinely challenged my students to contrive a sentence I couldn’t figure out how to diagram.) There was a long stretch of providing back-up as my sons progressed through the system and learned to write. (Wow, so different these days...and you never know but maybejustmaybe they'll look back one day and "Aha, thanks for loving to write, Mom!" 😉) There was a fun stretch of writing book reviews for a magazine. Not sure how many times I’ve started writing a book...more than I care to admit ! There is one I did indeed finish though - The Pursuit of Happiness curriculum. I'll be writing letters as long as I can hold a pen. And a little over two years ago, I dove head over heels into blogs.
Which brings me back to my mental inventory exercise. I checked the date of my last blog. June 7, 2021.
What the heck?! Why did I drop this headoverheelsing endeavor? After all, writing ranks right up there with movement in terms of being a supremely effective, happiness-producing, stabilizing pursuit.
I
know
this.
My life has taught me this.
Anyway, rather than throw too much shade at myself for temporarily betraying my beloved Writing, I walked over here to my computer, sat my butt down, and said, “Hello, keyboard, I’m back, let's get reacquainted.”
Sometimes we stop doing the thing we enjoy or that we know is energizing/soothing/stabilizing because we need a break. Maybe a life-altering event, good or bad, caused us to drop everything else for the time being. Maybe we got lazy. Maybe we blame it on the ‘B’ word (hm, think twice, busy can drift to bullshit)...or the 'P' word, which still has the world turned sideways. Maybe we got really sticky with the “What’s the point?” question. Maybe we started telling a story starting with, “If it’s not revenue-generating...”
I get it. I get all these rationalizations. And that last one, well, sure, making money doing something you love is quite incentivizing. But it’s not everything. And, in the case of my writing, it’s really not even anything. I mean, nice as that would be, I’m just not doing this for the big bucks.
I really just love the challenging exercise of putting words together cleanly, clearly, concisely, compellingly. And there's this - it's growing my personal library of treasures that surely one day my sons will get a kick out of reading, right? For now, if all I’ve got is an audience of one, well, that’s enough for me, because it takes that what's-missing feeling of loss, wraps it in a warm, cozy blanket, and hands it a cup of tea. 😊
So if, in all this pandemic craziness, you’ve betrayed some of your true loves, I encourage you to track them down, give them a hug, and Restart the conversation. Start falling in love again, rediscover the joy. It’s so sweet! And we could all use some of that as we head through these shortest, darkest days of winter.
