The call to simplify…

A friend sent this piece by Ann Patchett as inspiration for taking oneself seriously as a writer. I love it and did find inspiration in it, but I also found it rather divorced from the world of being an at-home mother.

Additionally, I am someone who seriously needs to spend a good bit of time on meal preparation — and on exercise and/or yoga, and at least one bodywork appointment per month, if not more — or everything else falls apart. I know that I need a lot of components to be running on all cylinders. If I ignore one thing — sleep, or healthy food, or exercise, or acupuncture/chiropractic/craniosacral work — for a month, I spend the next 6 weeks or more playing some kind of catch up.

My feeling is often that there just isn’t enough time — not to do all the things I “have” to do, but to do all the things I want and feel like I need to do to feel alive and with both feet on the ground and my hands pressed together reaching for a star. It’s like there’s a Top 40 of needs in my world, not just one or three things that can demand my laser focus.

I know there are ways I can cut down on some things. Blogging for instance. But the work (to upgrade/combine/streamline) seems so much more daunting than just plodding along (which has some personal rewards, or I wouldn’t do it). Shifting toward a new momentum is where I need some motivation, a coach, the decision to make something a priority. But I don’t think working on writing presence/business development is going to help me fit more writing hours in the day anytime soon (as the article discusses). So the goals seem to be at odds. Would that I’d quit teaching and started freelancing before I became a mother!

The multiple strands in multiple directions are not doing wonders for my sleep or centeredness, especially as long as I keep acting like I rue them.

I am resolving nothing for the new year other than to try to be kind to myself and to be in the moment in whatever I’m doing — even if I’ve got multiple things going, I’d like to stop making that wrong and just play with the complexity, which is, I recently realized, something I do truly value for its own sake.