Creative Year in Review

I think about writing often. I think about creative endeavors often. These can take so many different shapes. But they often butt up against cares of the world. But if one thing is true - I desperately want to partake in some form of creative expression.

This desire in itself is good. I remember when I used to lack it. Someone would ask me what I like to do for fun, and I would come up empty.

The past year of discipline has helped me arrive here — or should I say, really high expectations that I met 70% of the time. (Yes, I changed that 6 to a 7 so I would be considered “passing.”)

While it was helpful to have the expectations insofar as they provided structure, it appears they have created a void as life has prevented me from being as consistent as I used to be able to.

This should not be a surprise — I was already running on thin margins. A typical morning looked like:

• 5:00am - alarm goes off

• 5:30am - in my chair with pourover coffee, reading the Bible or writing, eventually praying

• 6:00am - in the writing chair

• 7:00am - off to exercise

• 8:00am - showered, back in the chair, breakfast in hand, ready to start the day.

Now that I’m married, I’m doing well if I get up on the 3rd snooze of my alarm.

Mornings are different. Not bad, but different. And they definitely do not include writing if I want to start the work day at 8am. (Aubrey and I regularly debate the official start of the work day.) I have not thought twice about this fact until this very moment — as I sit in an empty house, on a Tuesday evening, waiting another hour for the stew to finish cooking. If it weren’t for the quiet mornings earlier this year, I wouldn’t be here writing.

So where do we go from here? Now that things are different?

The year has been marked by much change. At the beginning, I was leaving my full-time gig at a start-up in order to — leave. That was about as far as I got. Which, if you know me personally, is antithetical to how I operate. But when the clouds spell out “go,” you go. In part one, Aubrey and I got engaged. In the part two, we got married. As we near the end of this act, we have been blessed with even more change. But not for not! Looking back, I know some things that I didn’t know at the beginning of the year.