Concept credit to Jennifer Louden, who graciously posted two questions yesterday…and the one about what would be enough for today really resonated with me!
Confession 1: I feel like I’m crawling my way into the weekend. Confession 1b: I may feel a little guilty for saying that.
Last week I crossed the two month mark of this sabbatical thing, and I’ve still got zero regrets. I realize I haven’t truly been on sabbatical for all of those two months- thanks, cross-country move- and I’ve been awestruck at the number of ways I’ve found to keep myself entertained with scholarly work, collaborations, and ongoing projects.
I also have a (personal) writing project I’m working on and this week I got STUCK. I mean, I don’t know that I wrote 10 words this week, and if I did they were during the process of editing. Stuck-stuck. And when I tried to distract myself by working on a concept for this week’s blog post…same. Stuck-stuck. I mean, I have notes for an idea, but just can’t get the concepts to coalesce. Maybe next week we’ll talk about creativity and post-traumatic growth; it won’t be today.
So here we are, Friday night, with me sharing my awesome case of writer’s block with y’all. I know it’s not permanent, and if history proves anything to me, when it passes the floodgates will open. That’s how my Master’s thesis got written- I did the research but couldn’t pull it together, gave myself some grace with lots of runs and long bike rides to process information and ideas, then BOOM! I think I wrote almost all of it in about 2 1/2 weeks. Since 2020 Bozeman feels not terribly different from 1990 Boulder, I’m hoping it will deliver the goods for me.
I’m not going to go all “Woe is me” either in terms of not getting much (any) writing done this week for my pet project; I’ve done some background research, I’ve talked to a couple of people who have been phenomenally helpful for starting to pull my ideas together (and for reminding me that I can do this), and I’ve figured out what the steps forward will be. It hasn’t been wasted time by any means.
So today, or this week, taking care of me and moving this project forward looks like a reminder that I don’t have to push right now. I can ask, “What is enough for today?” and I can honor the answer to that. Some days that may be lots of words. Some days that may be no words at all and just taking my daily photo of something that strikes my fancy. And some days…some days it’s just reminding myself and all of you who are patient with my writing that we owe ourselves that grace.
For today, that’s enough.
An excellent topic! We all need to understand that Enough is Enough on some days, even when we don’t feel like we have accomplished much.