#UndulationsAndMinutia

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Sometimes weeks and months are loaded with moments and days that are filled to the brim with what feels like minutia. My last few weeks have been full of planning and details and meetings and phone calls and sometimes it seems like the days have been piled up with anything but writing. I have been working hard on making sure that my book will be out soon (like in the next month or so soon—hopefully), and in addition to that I have been asked to work on a few projects that have included working with some great people and producing some cool stuff, but all of this has majored on the technical and been super skinny on the creative.

The other day as I sat at my computer and tried to understand the gibberish that was a phone call to my webhosting service, I almost started crying, and all I could think was #writerswannawrite. (Sometimes thinking and writing in hashtags really does communicate the way you feel. I am kind of jealous of college students today. When I think of what I could have done with the hashtag back then.) But it is so true. Writers want to write. That’s why we became writers in the first place. And this is not something that you would do if you didn’t want to—cause that would be #craycray .

And yet, like most lives that are textured and full of the beautiful and the mundane, a writer’s life is not just writing. It is not just coffee sipping and letting your fingers dance on the little black keys until your characters come alive and your heart dances with them. Sometimes it’s staring at a blank screen and having no idea what to say, and sometimes it’s writing, and sometimes it’s fielding emails until your fingers forget what it is to write something beautiful rather than functional.

When you write, you inevitably want people to read what you have written. And there is the rub. There are the phone calls and web searches and queries and meetings and networking and designing business cards, and updating your website, and oh so much technical work that you can begin to wonder where the writing has gone.

And sometimes you get scared. Scared that you might never crawl out of the production of your writing and back onto the page. Scared that your life is bogging down or not what you thought it was going to be. Scared that you are spinning your wheels and throwing up mud and you don’t even know it.

But I’ve been scared before. I’ve been scared that I would never get where I was going. I’ve been scared that I would be lost in my present until it became my future. That I would be right here, in the middle of a life I barely understood and much less relished, forever.

I’ve also been buried before. I’ve been up to my neck in minutia until I wondered if it would cover me over. I’ve been wading through what seemed like pointlessness until my entire body hurt with the effort. I’ve been scared that I would always be buried.

And I survived.

I survived because of the equally hopeful and terrifying truth that life is a constantly whirling ball of energy that can both seem to never move and then change underneath your feet when you least expect it.

Because even if life has taught you little, you really can’t help but learn about undulations.

Spaces, moments, undulations, seasons.

We have a season for learning and one for doing.  One for accomplishing, one for resting.  One for being high on our dream, and one for slogging through the things that need to be done.

Today I am in more in a place of slogging. Maybe you are too. Mine is kind of pleasant slogging because it is moving toward a goal, but it still has the air of slog about it.

But like all the other moments that stretched into days and weeks when I thought for sure there had to be something else on the horizon, it will change.

And I will crawl back onto the page.

And I will write.

And then we will do this all over—again.

And I will try in the middle of the quiet and the undulations to remember to love each of my moments. The ones that seem filled with the important and the ones that seem loaded with what feel like meaningless tasks.

Because they are all part of moving forward, of being alive, of learning to live a life that I love.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe I don’t even know which moment is which. I can’t help but wonder if the ones that I deem important are really not as grand as I would imagine, and the ones I want to hurry through…maybe they are where life is found. I don’t know. But I wonder. #whichmomentsmatter

But that is for another day. One with fewer emails and more time to just think. One that may be just around another corner or two or twelve.

 

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