Fireworks

I have to remind myself to calm down.

This is only the third day of early alarms. Only three morning hours pulled away from the stars and given to the words that tug on their leashes. 686 words the first day, 738 yesterday, 505 this morning—not many, but almost 2000 more than I started the week with.

This is something to celebrate.

This is something to take in stride.

As it goes every time a writing project lights up my mind with fireworks, I treat inspiration like a house ablaze. Every moment is an emergency with exclamation points and a fierce dread of what will happen if I don’t write twenty pages NOW. I kick myself under the desk for being such a slow writer. (I mean, my paragraphs come together about as quickly as Medieval cathedrals… and that’s with coffee.) I compare the timeline of my life to other authors and bemoan that I’m three years overdue for my Great American Novel. The housework falls behind and the girls entertain themselves while I stare at my computer screen, trying to coax a few more sentences out of a tired afternoon.

This sense of urgency was hardwired into me a long time ago—admittedly in a religious context, but so effectively that I fill up each day’s schedule with an impossible number of tasks and then feel guilty for not finishing. My mind fights continuously against my brain, my heart, and my energy levels to accomplish more, more, now, now… and it’s worse when it’s something I love.

I so appreciate the Julia Cameron quote Christina posted a few days ago:

“Most of us live with a continual sense of emergency. We have a fear that we are too late and not enough to wrestle a happy destiny from the hands of the gods. What if there is no emergency? What if there is no need to wrestle? What if our only need is receptivity and a gentle openness to guidance? What if, like the Arabian horses grazing outside my window, we are simply able to trust?”

That there are more days to this life, more hidden springs of inspiration, more quiet hours of words set free in sequence, is a concept both foreign and wonderful to me. It whispers that I can write without sacrificing my girls’ childhoods or my own sanity. It means that a few hundred words a day are enough. It gives me permission to walk toward the fireworks without grasping or giving up and to write a book over a ten-year span if that’s how long it takes.

(Though I really hope it doesn’t.)