Time passed. One day became two. Weeks became months. What began as a temporary absence evolved into a void.
No writing. No journaling. No attempt at an opening paragraph. On occasion, I hastily blurted a random thought or two into a voice memo on my phone. But the recorded words stayed in coded form. Bits and bytes waiting to be transcribed and brought to life as words on a page.
For the better part of a year, I have worked on at least one piece of writing at a time. An idea or story. An outline for a book. Always some small part of my brain processing and playing with an idea, while racing through the craziness of my day.
But the last few months have been a bit of a hiatus.
The intensity of my work life and family life converged for a while, with quite a bit of travel mixed in. San Francisco for a conference. Klamath Falls, Oregon for a brief family Thanksgiving. Preparing for my son’s long-awaited homecoming for winter break back in Chicago. Christmas spent covering the hospital and ICU. Ringing in the New Year while working in an ICU in Elkhart, Indiana.
And somewhere between the West Coast and the rural Midwest, I got lost.
That little part of my brain stopped sorting new thoughts and ideas. Instead, I fed it a steady diet of Netflix, cryptocurrency and progressive politics. Comfort food for my cerebral cortex. And as the writer inside me took a leave of absence, I found other parts of myself taking a time-out as well. My running shoes sat untouched most days. My swim bag remained buried in the corner of the mudroom, as I went AWOL from my water polo team. Whatever exercise I managed was mindless and without purpose. As my writing and journaling stopped, so did my desire to physically push and challenge myself.
But I did not close my eyes.
I watched my daughter continue to face the challenges of being a sixteen-year-old junior in high school, navigating the ever-shifting landscape of friends, school and life. Juggling final exams and ACT tests, hours of dance and Poms, injuries, babysitting and a boyfriend. Like her dancing, She stumbles at times. But like she does when dancing, she pops right back up and continues moving forward, becoming more adept and able every time.
I watched my son face the challenges of being nineteen, while working on the universal yet uniquely personal battle between autonomy and dependence. Between freedom and restriction. More often than not, that process now takes place out of my sight, as he currently lives two thousand miles away. I am still coping with this. But each time our orbits align (and hopefully not collide), I see a little bit more of the man he is becoming.
I watched my wife challenge herself to tap into her mathematics and education degrees, putting herself out there to help neighbors, family and friends with the mysteries of high school geometry and pre-calculus. I saw this amazing cycle of confidence build. Not only in her students as they became better prepared for their quizzes and tests, but also in herself as she applied a unique approach to help each student fill in his or her specific knowledge gaps.
I watched. More passive than active. Letting events play out and unfold before me, often while stretched out on the family room couch. My sweatshirt and a comforter worked overtime, protecting me from both the falling temperatures outside and having to actively engage in the world around me.
But it is time. Time to leave passivity behind, along with the comforter and the couch.
Despite the cold, I went for a run outside the other day. A few years ago, running in sub-freezing temps was a no-brainer. Just put on the right clothes and go! Now it’s a bit of chore. It took more thought and effort to push through the inertia of inactivity.
It started with shivering. Time felt slow. Movement felt forced. But ten minutes into the run, my body heat began to build, and with it, the familiar warmth comforted me. The sound of air moving in and out of my mouth layered on the rhythmic sound of my shoes disturbing loose gravel and stone under my feet, brought me back to an old familiar space.
For the next forty minutes my joints ached. My calves and hamstrings burned. I sweat. It was snowing, and the falling flakes were cool on my flushed face as I ran through their vertical descent. And sometime during that relatively routine run that I had done countless times in the past, a small dormant part of my brain came back to life.
It’s time again to write.