Category Archives: following through

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Making Room for Now

the files

“The greater story is unfolding before their eyes….and they are clinging to their smaller stories.” – Tina Howard

THE FILE CABINET I want is not in stock. It’s not available online either. But I’ve already given away my old one and the files from it lie everywhere.

I glance at the line-up on the bench, the many linear inches, and see that huge chunks are unfinished manuscripts and bits and pieces of once-important ideas I never started on, clippings that once struck me, the “someday I’ll write about” things.

Are they important to me now? Do I even know what’s there?

* * *

AN ARCHAEOLOGY intern, digging through these remains, might venture guesses about me and what presses in now. They’d get it wrong. No hint exists. Not here. There’s no room for now here.

Maybe a new file cabinet isn’t the answer.

“I can’t write the stuff I once did and I need to let it go,” I say and it seems like such an epiphany. But didn’t I say the exact same words to a friend in Texas last September?

She heard me. I was the one not listening.

* * *

EPIPHANIES happen in an instant, but the follow-through can be long in coming.

“The greater story is unfolding before their eyes….and they are clinging to their smaller stories.” I read. Yes indeed. My feet are all tangled up in the old stuff and I have no room for what’s before me now.

Scratch file cabinet from the list. Add shredder.
Time to make room for now.

* * *

See all the Letting Go posts here.

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Writing Tip: Spend it All

A THOUSAND WORDS A DAY, I see it’s been.
Not on purpose, not a goal,
but just because my pockets were full.

This is how the economics of writing works.
You have to spend it all.
Every day.

1,000 words a day, give or take a few,
and the proof,
a 3-ring binder,
new in summer,
once holding a solitary sheet,
now almost full.

What’s given in a day
must be spent,
all of it.

Next day, if needed, more comes.

A FEARFUL WRITER, risk-averse,
always saving for the rainy day,
finds this a difficult principle to act upon,

to pull the pockets inside-out
and shake free
every crumb,
every bit of lint,
every last comma.

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The Gathering

Maybe not all running
involves getting on a ship and sailing for Tarshish.

STUDYING JONAH on Wednesday mornings,
I wonder what my Nineveh is, what I’ve been called to and am running from.

It can’t be something this simple, can it?

Twice it’s happened, sitting in church.
I learn of someone
having tests,
receiving a diagnosis,
starting treatment -
all familiar trigger words, familiar territory -
and it strikes me
I need to meet this person.
I need to gather together the lot of them.
My border collie tendencies, that.

But months pass
and I do not act.
Stuck in idea stage, no follow-through.

* * *

Finally, Nineveh-pondering, I move forward.
Make calls.
Issue invitations.

“I don’t know,
but there might be some benefit
in our gathering together,”
I say.

And nobody thinks it’s a stupid idea!
What made me think they would?

* * *

With less orchestration than it takes to roll out of bed
it happens.

The meal is easy
The conversation is easy.
And when at the end they say,
“We must do this again,”
the YES of it is easy.

Afterwards
I see Wally sitting on the screen porch,
savoring,
which adds to my own savoring.

Can it be this simple, a Nineveh?
Easy,
but just as easily not done
by failure to follow through?

Still savoring, but with way too much leftover dessert in the freezer. :-)

image: “Sail Away” by Martha Kuper Brinson. See this and other prints of original watercolors by Martha Kuper Brinson at her Etsy shop