I wanted to write about a lot of different things today, and I am sure that some of them will exist tomorrow and even Thursday when I get around to talking about them. I feel it is important to look in the rearview mirror before you go too far forward, less you forget where you’ve been and get lost in the going. I’m back to over a year ago now, a post that read as 7.682, though it wasn’t. I’d flipped the first two numbers in haste one day and lost the thread of it for at least ten more days. This is how disconnected and deep into my wanderings I was then. I wasn’t looking in the rear view at all.
The post itself tells the tale of self reflection and assessment. I was doing a series of prompts that were intended to go in my CRW summer workshop. They didn’t. I kept the same old stuff and taught the same old shell, because I wasn’t truly focused on change then. I wasn’t trying to improve experiences. I was still lost and just trying to find a thread to follow back to somewhere or someone I recognized. I get lost like that sometimes. I forget what my goal is for pursuit of some new strategy or fly by night hope to get me going or get me to a point of success faster. The truth I’ve learned in my life is that fast isn’t fast. Fast is steady and without deviation from the pursuit. You write four pages a day for a month and you get 120 pages. You write ten pages a day a few days and take a few days off to reset, maybe get five or six a few days more and take another few days, and you’ll get through the month wondering how you topped out under sixty and maybe even feeling good that you got that far along. Still, it was half of what you had in you had you done it the right way. That’s mercurial. That isn’t fast or steady or, by the very nature of the term, sustainable.
When I took that pause back at 7.682, I was pausing in order to catch my breath and hget away from what I was doing because I was getting run down. I wasn’t having fun as much as I thought I would, and sure enough, I broke that habit soon after. Steady. That’s the message I needed to learn from it. Better late than never.