Summer Laziness

First it was the eyes, then the surgeries, then the heat, now the Canadian wildfires—there’s always a reason to put things off and lay around the house reading or doing a craft. Taking a walk or a short bike ride through the woods, watching the sunset orange and mauve or rise all yokey in the morning. I make excuses to visit the garden to meditate over the cucumbers, kale, the tomatoes that stubbornly refuse to bear fruit. Anything. Everything except settle in to write.

I had a check in the other day with a writer friend. This person is head and shoulders above me with her abilities and talents, yet—she told me she’s not writing and has no pans to at the moment. I asked if it was for a season or what?? She answered, I don’t know. She hadn’t made a decision to quit, only to stop feeling bad about not writing.

It freaked me out.

I can let things slide. I can take a break, but I can never stop thinking I should be writing. The voice inside my head, the devil on my shoulder: they’ve always been there. To live in absence of those things, I wonder if I would feel freedom or completely alone. Untethered from myself.

Even now, putting it down in words is how I process life.

To be fair she hasn’t quite given up. She’s journaling. But writing is hard, is what she said. It’s work. And, for now, it isn’t making her happy, healthy, or sustaining her.

The literary bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen is famous for his writer’s block. How do we know? Because he wrote about it. Franzen detailed this harrowing creative paralysis in his seminal 1996 essay “Why Bother?” and his interview in The Paris Review. At the time, he was working at an artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, while going through a painful separation from his first wife.

So, he was able to make gold out of straw. Some of us just get hay.

Point being: he didn’t stop; he changed gears.

Many creatives switch things up. My friend, for example, the one who freaked me out, is doing watercolor landscapes. Whatever she sees outside her window. The mind splits off from the prescribed path and makes an artistic detour. Or runs parallel. Instead of describing something in words, she simply draws it. The vision is there, for all to see—without the expectations. She has simply allowed it to become evident.

I’m still freaked out. But will allow myself to relax during this season. There are so many ideas I have, projects to revise, always one more thing to do—yet I will take a moment to ride my bike to the lake and listen to the local orchestra perform under the bandshell while fireflies blink around me.

Canadian wildfires obscure sky, air quality alert