I began the year having labelled it a Quiet Year—time to take a breath, to garden, to write, and to make blackberry jam.
Change is like that.
You hang on for the turbulence that is the process and then things grow calm. You adjust to the new and let go of the old. And you discover things that were previously undiscoverable.
Like the drive, for example.
My new job involves a fifty minute commute—my only real hesitation in the bigger conversation of whether I would take the position. I worried that the drive would exhaust me, that I would find myself dreading getting in the car, and that before I had a chance to settle, the drive would break me.
Instead I discovered butterflies.
Driving along this windy, country road, past the primary school my kids went to, past the farm house we once lived in, past my favourite apple tree grower, up and over the top of the Strzelecki Ranges, then down into South Gippsland is made magical by the butterflies. A kaleidoscope rises up as I drive by, tumbles in the sudden gust, then settles back to the feast of roadside flowers. I am made better by seeing the butterflies.
Of all of the things that I thought might be good about the change, I never once added butterflies to that list. I didn’t know that they would be a thing, that they would matter to me, that they were even there.
Yet they are and they do.
That is the thing with being on the other side of change, you don’t know half of the good things change has in store for you until you get there.
Like downtime.
Twice a day, I am alone driving through breathtakingly beautiful country. I put on my favourite tunes and sing along, or finish listening to a podcast I started that morning while walking on the treadmill, or—my favourite on the way home—I listen to books about writing. An hour every day taking in thoughts and ideas about something I fall more and more in love with.
Some books leave me eager to put pen to paper as soon as I get home, others are a slow burn that I listen to right to the end—audio books cost money and I don’t want to be wasteful—only to discover that they have been at work within me all along and I am made better by listening to them.
I am made less anxious about my writing while paradoxically becoming more productive. Because I am less worried about every word I write, I am able to think more about how the writing sounds rather than how many words I have written. I read the work out loud, asking myself if the words and sentences are interesting to listen to. Are they varied enough? Do they speak? Do they say to you, my reader, what I am hoping they will say?
You see, what I want to say is that the process of change is hard but that within the process are gifts—blessings, if you will—that you cannot know until you get there. I didn’t know about the butterflies until I started driving along the road. I didn’t know that just listening about writing could improve my writing until I had time to listen.
My life is quieter now. I can’t tell you how much I like that.
It’s a funny expression, isn’t it, to say that I can’t tell you something when the sentence is in fact telling the exact the thing it says it can’t say? In telling you I can’t tell you, I have told you. I bet there is a name for that type of writing.
Let’s nerd-out together for a minute.
Mark Forsyth wrote a book called The Elements of Eloquence (2013) about rhetoric. He talks about catachresis, defining it as ‘a sentence that is so startlingly wrong that it’s right’ (p. 140). I find myself wondering if a phrase that is telling you it can’t say the thing it is saying falls into this category. Likely, it has a label all of its own. I would be interested in what it is called, so please leave a comment should you know.
I can’t tell you how much I would appreciate it.
Back to this quiet life, the calm that comes after the turbulence that is change.
Folks given to drama find this state of quiet disquieting at best. Life doesn’t feel lived once the turbulence of change has been navigated and so they must find ways of creating turbulence. Throwing a few rocks in the river might do the trick or perhaps rushing ahead unprepared to the waterfall down stream.
There is a lot to be said about allowing life to flow in its quiet, lovely way. Soon enough you’ll lose a paddle or your boat will spring a leak. Why not enjoy the peace while you have it?
It is in peace that you are gifted with unexpected things.
Take my writing room, for instance. We finished renovating—something I do not wish to do again for some time—and I have been unpacking and settling into my writing room.
Finding a name for this room has been part of the journey. Originally, we called this the book room as it was too small to be a proper bedroom and seemed a good place to keep a lot of books. Then it began to be used as a spare room for the occasional overnight visitor. Not the nicest of spaces, given that it is almost a glorified cupboard with a window in it. Then we renovated and I temporarily moved my study into the space while the rumpus room, my previous abode, was given a serious make-over.
I found I liked it this new space. A lot. So I kept it. But it felt funny calling it a study or an office. Neither of those names communicated what the room meant to me. Once I hit on the name Writing Room, the space changed.
Change, if you will let it, will take you to beautiful places and gift you with things you haven’t yet imagined.
Allow change to do its work on you.
This Writer's Life 