A Personal Note

You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing a lot in the last week or so, because I’m sure you have nothing else to do in your life except keep track of what I am or am not writing. Well, there is a reason for that and it’s simply this--I needed a break.

I always find that writing something long and immersive, like a book, is a little like being on a binge. While you’re doing it, you have a great excuse for not dealing with so many other things! But when it’s done, and you surface, real life hits you.

I like being in the middle of something, preferably something big and all consuming. I dislike revving myself up to begin something new, and I truly don’t much like finishing. Recently, I completed The Movement We Need, the book I began writing almost two years ago, chapter by chapter, here on Substack. Finishing coincided with my second knee replacement, and now that both are done, I find myself craving some time to simply let ideas percolate and focus on other things.

Writing on Substack has many amazing benefits, but it does create a kind of ongoing low- level pressure to continually put out more content. When I write a lot, I gain subscribers. When I don’t, I lose subscribers, as people’s yearly subscriptions run out and they don’t renew. That’s fair enough: there’s dozens of people whose work I would like to support, but I have to restrict myself from signing onto too many monthly subscriptions that I forget about and then discover I’ve way overspent my budget. But if part of one’s life mission involves writing, as mine does, it’s helpful to have incentives, both the carrot and the stick.

However, nothing about my life’s purpose involves writing whether or not I actually have anything original to say. I’ve never offered a daily newsletter. I don’t have a research staff, it’s just me. And I do find that to write anything with any depth, perception, or originality requires times of not writing. Maybe some of that is time for reading and research, but sometimes I just need blank time, when things can simmer in the unconscious while I read shallow books of pure entertainment and do other things.

Writing has its satisfactions, the deep satisfaction of feeling you may be influencing people for the good, making a small contribution to the improvement of the world, striking a blow here and there against the current fascist takeover and planting the seeds of a vision of better possibilities. For me, also the deep joy of doing something I feel is in alignment with the purpose for which I was placed in this world.

But what writing doesn’t have is that immediate sense of satisfaction you get from making something with your hands, cooking something good to eat, creating something pretty, or doing something that immediately improves your lives in the short run. Making shelves, for example. A year or so go I spent many months building shelves in my cabin. I got to be reasonably good at it and every single one of those shelves has made my life better. They give me places to put things, and the more things that have their own place to be put the more likely I am to put them there and the less clutter I get buried in. I truly love shelves!

Over the last few weeks, I turned six IKEA muslin curtains into a set of three beautiful Austrian shades. Now we can pull them up and down instead of attempting to pull them aside to open and close them. I probably spent as much time ripping seams out as I did sewing seams in. Despite carefully measuring everything at least twice so that I could make three identical panels, no two curtains turned out exactly the same. Sewing, for me, is a bit like someone once described war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Well, maybe not terror, but devastating realizations that you just sewed the wrong things together or the right things together on the wrong side. Nonetheless they’re done and somehow I think they actually look pretty good.

And one thing I’ve learned about the creative process, in whatever form: when you get all knotted up in tangles of frustration, put it down and step away. That seam will be easier to rip out in the morning. That chapter will sort itself out in another day. Granted, that’s a privilege, and one you can’t generally exercise in the midst of war, but when you can, take a break. Don’t feel guilty. It’s part of the process. The work will thank you.

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