Silences

It’s been a long time since I wrote here. I reached a 12 month milestone, celebrated it and then not long after, for some reason I cannot fathom, stopped cold dead, suddenly and completely silent.

What happened? Work took over my life in the main; a very busy and demanding work role, things to solve that could not be satiated, consuming the creative part of me. At night and on weekends, there was little left. It was definitely hard to create in this space. Some poor life choices too, like too much television, but sometimes it was all I could do. The reading, writing part of me I treasure so much languished sadly in this interchange.

This blog as for many, is a tool to keep me writing. In the post celebrating the first anniversary of ‘Transcending’, I spoke about my sense of achievement in keeping at it, ‘writing, researching, tuning in and reading others’, the value of writing, the process and the product. When I look back and read that post, it celebrates so much that is central to me, then comes to that screaming halt, one more post later and 180 days ago.

So time to transcend the silence, move on. It will take some doing; the work role remains insistent. I’ve reached for Tillie Olsen’s ‘Silences’ to help interpret it all. But in the end,  I can spend more time analysing the politics of it, reading about it, trying to understand the reasons for stalling but maybe it is best just to accept it happened for circumstantial reasons and move beyond.

As Anne Lamott exorts us in her article, ‘Time Lost and Found‘, it is really most likely to be an issue of choices, priorities and time management.

I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.

I’m reading Kate Grenville’s ‘Searching for the Secret River‘ and am reminded through that journey of Kate’s writing experiences of the need for stealth and commitment.  Kate uses a whole arsenal of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

It really is so important, as Chris Guillebeau reminds us, to start with what you have, not wait for more and generally just to keep moving. So I begin again here and elsewhere, in slivers of words, in slivers of time, to counteract the silence of the blank page, moving on.