For the joy of it
I came up against my first real can’t-get-out of bed health challenge since we moved to Washington, what I like to call “normal person sick”: sore throat, aches, coughing like a lifelong smoker. And you want to know what was stressing me out, piling my suffering on top of suffering? Missing my writing goal for the week!
As I scrambled for content while nursing a heating pad on my raw chest, I had a bit of a realization. Oh! This project is actually about receiving creativity - not beating the life out of it! This is about freedom and pleasure and reveling in my gifts. Not about posting four times a week. Sometimes I can be so dutiful and annoyingly task oriented that I miss out on the spirit of the goal I’ve set.
“Do your writing in joy and gratitude!!!!” my dear friend and writing mentor Mark Chmiel texted me after I posted about my Summer of Gifts goals, already knowing this lesson for me.
And I was like: “yeah, yeah, I know, I know.”
Hours later I sat with Nate outside in the late afternoon under this gorgeous blooming rhododendron tree just outside our house. I thought about how its beauty comes from it just being itself - a tree that shares its crazy beautiful gifts with us for just a few weeks in late spring, and then rests for the remainder of the year. It doesn’t try so hard to be so stunning. It just is.
Then I took a bath instead of doing my writing practice. For the pure pleasure of it.
Creativity has been a concept I’ve wrestled a lot with during my illness because I didn’t feel I had the life force to be imaginative when I was in the trenches. Writing is always the first thing to go when I feel shitty, and the first thing to come back when I’m back to feeling well.
But this practice of regular shared writing is nudging me to see that great art always blooms with a certain effortlessness, not necessarily under high pressure deadlines. Maybe inspiration is just hovering around us all the time, easily accessed yet content to move on to the next person willing to put a great idea into form. Maybe our day itself is the content, and the discipline lines in merely paying attention to what wants to be shared and sharing it. Maybe it’s that easy.
