Hot Turkey, William Faulkner, and the One Big Project.

Here is the new way I have come up with to justify to myself the fact that I am still sort of a C student when it comes to improving my life: rather than going cold turkey on how I had been living and going hot turkey on this new lifestyle, what I should have done was PHASE IN the changes. “Phase in” means that I should have done it over time, I should have spread it out. How did I not think of that? It is only LITERALLY what any article about changing habits says!

I’ve been doing a pretty good job. I do some small creative stuff (like this) in the mornings just for me, and I have been running almost every day and I have been very good about sticking with my healthified new diet (by “diet”  I mean “new eating regiment” as opposed to “diet” as a thing one does for a while to lose weight) and I have been reading and writing in the evenings rather than listening to podcasts and endlessly scrolling Twitter.

Where I have been failing is in the mornings, but we have talked about my shoulder and how stiff and sore it is in the mornings, so I have not been consistent about doing my morning yoga. The other way I’m failing is with my writing in the evenings. I’m kind of just tinkering. I honestly don’t have the ONE BIG PROJECT right now, so each night I’m kind of just playing around. And that is okay, because the important thing about writing that people aren’t told enough is that the most significant part of any writing practice is to put your butt in the seat everyday. The writing flows from that act, not the other way around. There’s a famous quote usually attributed to Faulkner that goes, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”

That’s kind of what I’m doing in the evenings. I’m trying to rebuild that part of my writing practice. I’ve had a weird last few years — and while weird is not always bad — they have decimated my writing practice. There are a lot of reasons for this and we will no doubt get into them at some point, but for now, I’m doing a kind of writer’s physical therapy after a car accident and I’m metaphorically learning to walk again.  

So if you need me any evening, I’ll be sitting right here from 7:30 to 9pm, relearning how to place one foot in front of the other and remembering who I am and what I do.

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