When I decided I was going to begin a blog, I thought it would help me be intentional about writing on a regular basis. HA! Then life came along, especially the part of life that includes teaching 6 different classes, all of which require regular grading of writing (which I am terrible at doing quickly). Between that and whatever weird physiological changes have happened to me due to the COVID sequestering, I seem to have lost most of my creative drive. I’ve had ideas for a few different blog posts, but after staring at the screen for half an hour, struggling to put more than a couple of sentences on the page, I give up and go make dinner, or turn back to the grading that I’ve neglected.
All that to say, I regret that I have not done a better job blogging regularly. I hope that will change, but I have to be realistic and warn you that it will probably continue to be sporadic and random.
This week has been a little bit different. On a whim a couple of months ago, my wife and I decided that we were going to break our normal routine of spending Thanksgiving with one family and Christmas with the other. We nixed the idea of spending as much time in the car driving from Virginia to my parents’ home in Oklahoma as we would actually being there. Instead, this week we are fulfilling a lifelong dream I’ve had--to see the little beach town in North Carolina that I’ve visited almost every summer of my life at a time other than peak tourist season. As the week winds to a close, it has been everything we’d hoped for, and more.
On the one hand, I am struggling with the fact that I don’t own a wet suit, so venturing out into the water, as appealing as it looks, is a painfully cold and generally unpleasant experience. But that is really about the only downside to the time. I have spent a couple of hours every morning grading and lesson planning, but this is much better than years past when I would have several hours each day devoted to school work. The rest of the time has been spent reading (I finished Amber Sparks’ And I Do Not Forgive You, and am working on the Richard Ellman biography of Oscar Wilde), playing games and watching movies with my sons, and lounging on the beach. It has been the chance to unplug that I hadn’t realized I needed so badly.
And in the midst of it all, I’ve found the first motivation to write anything in a couple of months. That’s not hyperbole; even emailing friends has felt like drudgery since September, not because I don’t like them or don’t want to hear from them, but simply because the idea of trying to get words out of my head in a coherent form has felt like carrying a boulder up a mountain (apologies, friends, if you are one of those that I’ve neglected writing to for extended periods of time).
Even reading back over what I’ve written, I find myself wondering, what’s the point? Why do I need to tell anyone that I haven’t been able to write? It’s pretty obvious by the fact that there haven’t been any new blog posts in a couple of months. But simply being able to string together 500+ words without banging my head on the wall and walking away in frustration is a feat in itself. And maybe this baby step will lead to another, and another, until I’m back at a place (mentally and in regards to my schedule) where I can spend some time writing each day.
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