Accepting...over and over again

How and why I write:

I love writing.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it because:
It’s like a craving (or an addiction)
It’s more than writing
It’s about quiet time alone
It’s about feelings, soul, connection
I work a little
My husband likes to cook (and I do the clean up)
My adult daughter Angela is in school fulltime and she and her son Henry, the love of my life, live with us.
I have: two other adult kids, Mia and Ian and a large extended family
A dog Samantha, cats Simeon and Maximus, birds Quizzie and Jimmy Joe
A house, a yard, a car, bills

Because of this pretty normal, ordinary life, I get up early and listen for what comes in the dark, quiet, pre-dawn stillness.

This morning I realize that I accept certain things physically – like the ordinary life -- like having, at present, frozen shoulder, and all the various limitations of time, body, age.

I started thinking about this because a month ago I was excited about getting two of the three books of A Course of Love into digital book format for Kindle. Then I got stalled out by the frozen shoulder. Every day this task undone comes into my mind – the feeling of the need to get the final book done.

There’s a history to why the two books I have up are the 2nd and 3rd rather than the first and second, and why the first is difficult. Almost, (in print anyway) a never before told story.

It’s 2001 and New World Library, the first publisher of this course, is preparing for the American Booksellers Association Convention. They produce a sampler of the first chapter of A Course of Love. We (the four of us who’d formed a core group to get it out) started getting feedback. One said the tone was too strident. It would turn people off. Another noted that the first chapter was like an introduction. For these and various other reasons, we suggested that New World choose a different sample chapter, and the first chapter became “The Prelude.”

Getting back to the present, I hadn't ever adjusted my own manuscript to fit this change. In it, Chapter 1 is still Chapter 1 rather than the prelude, and thus, chapter 2 and each chapter thereafter, is not numbered in the same way as the book. Since each paragraph is numbered, this means going through the manuscript and renumbering each paragraph. It turns out that doing that is murder on my arm…a whole different thing that straight typing…which isn’t as easy as it used to be either.

I got the first five chapters done and then gave up. I accepted it. Now is not the time.

Yet everyday I think, maybe I could just do a page or two a day. And everyday I decide that, no, it’s not time.

I find this kind of thing fascinating…acceptance and the need…at least the one I have, to accept over and over. Things like acceptance aren’t cut and dried. This is what I’ve found. Like those I work with in eldercare, I chafe against limitations. I have things I want to do. I have strong feelings about some of them. Even without strong feelings and with a good excuse not to wash the floor, I still, at times can’t wait around for someone else to do it. I can use my left arm so it’s still possible. I’ve tried, but using my left hand with a mouse is a no go.

Over the years one of the biggest discoveries I’ve made is that timing is not something to mess with. I still fret over it (uselessly I know), but in the end it always makes me listen. It’s almost like an intuition aided by signs, which our bodies provide all the time. Basically it goes like this: if it’s too much effort, now is not the time. And as much as you’d like to have a reason, you don’t have to know the reason.

I think it’s called trust.

This time

At this time last year my new book, The Given Self was just coming out. It “arrived” on December 8, a few days before it’s official publishing date. Obama was assigned the Nobel Prize around the same time and a friend in Norway wrote me with the headline there that said, “It’s not his fault.” I was making occasional forays out to my back yard cabin in my down coat, just beginning work with a new eldercare client, trying to find the time to do all the things my publisher suggested I do, and beginning to get anxious about the book launch scheduled for January (which came on a day of bitter cold and perilously ice-slicked roads).

I had also just begun to have those feelings of – “How can I write a book like The Given Self and then go against myself and my own nature?” At the time those feelings were about the publishing suggestions. (Do I really want to try to do radio shows when I never listen to them?) The promoting didn’t feel as if it fit me, but I received advice from fellow author Nouk Sanchez, that she was an introvert and anxious about such things initially too, but that they were also exciting. It was funny because, as little as I consider myself a public person or public speaker, I was told, a month later (at the book launch) that I was “a natural,” and anyway, I’d know for a while that I can do it, it’s just…you know…the Do I want to question.

My life this year is different in a lot of ways but I still ask myself those questions. I’m still discovering who I am now. The books I’ve written and read, and the readers who share with me, keep pushing me to be true to myself.

I love books.