Progress

I am totally loving life right now.

Coming back to Boston and living at home took a little bit of getting used to, and the jet lag definetly didn’t help.  The first couple weeks we were back, Kyle and I would wander through our days in a sleepy haze; people would talk to me and I felt a little lobotomized,  like I could only access half my brain.  We couldn’t help but fall asleep before 8pm, and wake up at two in the morning, three in the morning, little by little we would start waking up and going to bed on a more normal schedule.

And then I could finally get to work again.  Our first week back, I wrote for a measly 3 hours.  The next week, 11.  Last sunday I told myself to get focused, and I wrote for 20– and it has been awesome.  I had forgotten what it’s like to do something because you wanted to, not only for the results, but simply for the process.

I babysat three of my former students last weekend.  The middle child, now in 7th grade, spent the majority of the evening typing away at the computer with quiet diligence.  The constant clicking keyboard and his focus reminded me of myself at his age.  Somewhere along the line I forgot how much I loved to take a notebook out into a grassy spot somewhere in the sun and just write.

Somehow I made writing this unattainable thing that I would do once I had more time, not realizing that I always had the time.  I’ve been doing the work, and I haven’t been afraid of doing the work, and I remind myself, all the time, of the August Wilson quote:

“Most writers ignore the very thing that would get them results, and that’s craft. And how do you learn craft? In the trenches. You’ve got to do it. You got to get in there, you got to write. I say write and then write and write and write some more and go write some more.”

And it’s true. Clocked in twenty hours this week and I’ve been amazed at all the tools that I have retained, the techniques that I do instinctively.  But it’s awesome to feel like I’m finally making progress.