Practice

I’ve set a recent goal for myself to write for 30 minutes every day and publish. About 12 years ago I used to do this and my writing improved, my perfectionism lessened, and I felt excited to share what I’d written, even if a lot of times it was just sent into the void and no one saw it. So now that I have more control over my time during the day, I’ve decided to pick this practice up again. And I’ve been really impressed with how much I’ve changed over the years and how that’s impacted this practice I’m trying to restart.

When I first tried this, if I missed a day, I felt so guilty and upset. I felt like I’d completely messed things up and that guilt would really impede my ability to write for the next day or two. Like even if I wrote, I couldn’t let the guilt go. Whether or not it came through in my writing is irrelevant because for the next few days I’d feel that guilt and shame, regardless of if I completed the practice or even if I did more. And that guilt and shame got me nothing. It didn’t drive me forward, it didn’t make my work better. Instead my writing was basically the same quality (maybe worse) and I felt bad.

So this time I’m trying to be a bit more well-rounded about how I approach it. Every day might be a bit of a stretch, so I am saying “every day” to myself to keep it at the top of my mind, but some days are more or less busy, and the important thing about this writing is that it’s intentional. I want to be intentional about how I spend my time. I want to be present when I’m doing an activity, not doing it on auto-pilot. I’ve already missed a couple of days because of family events where it was difficult or rude for me to get on a computer or to be writing in my notebook. And that’s okay. I’m picking it up again now, but without the guilt. I was happy with how I spent my time over those days that I wasn’t able to write. So I’m not viewing it as messing up or falling behind, but rather that I had a set amount of time to do things, and I’m happy with how I used my time. I will do better the next day and try again tomorrow.

That’s a very new feeling for me. I don’t know if it’s age or growth or maybe even world-weariness, but I have less and less propensity towards unnecessary guilt these days. I can both feel my perfectionism letting go at the same time that my body and mind desperately fight to keep it around because it’s a pain I know. I feel the edges of guilt creep up in my mind but now can reassure myself that it doesn’t have any positive impact to be guilty over this. I feel my shoulders tense in response to the guilt and I say to myself, why am I holding my shoulders this way? Why aren’t I taking breaths? Instead, what would my life look like if I didn’t beat myself up over these small mistakes or a missed day here or there? What would my life look like if I just picked up where I left off and by-passed the act of self-admonishment? What would it feel like to relax my shoulders, unclench my toes, and breathe?

It’s been gratifying watching this change. I feel like I’m able to sit down and do the thing, whatever that thing might be, without as much background noise. I don’t obsess over what I should have done or could have done, I just take the new day and do what I can with it. And really that’s all any of us can do. There’s only so much time in our life, our years, our days. So instead of the guilt or the heaviness that we carry around, what if we let that go, and took each day, one by one, with actions that are a little bit better, a little bit lighter, and a little bit more at peace than they were the day before?