Setbacks and Carrying Water
It’s been a week of frustrations for me. And it’s only Wednesday. The new book I was working on stalled, the book-in-waiting hit a roadblock, and I lost a day to health stuff. And then, this morning, I was all set to spend a free hour on a long-procrastinated DIY project only to realize I don’t have any paint stripper. Gah.
There was nothing left for it but to go for a walk. Too many things inside my head were jumbling. New book ideas, paths forward for the book-in-waiting, parenting worries, house plans, and all of the emotions and frustrations and regret that commonly swirl in my brain when I’m at decision point. So I put on some terrifically moody music and got outside.
There’s this amazing book by Barbara Brown Taylor called “An Altar in the World” about accessing the sacred through the mundane. In it, there’s a chapter about “carrying water.” That is, the holiness of monotonous physical labor that connects us with both our fellow humans and our own humannness - the daily bundle of needs that make up being a living creature. I may be misremembering since the last time I read the book was last year but her point resonated with me: Sometimes, when we’re stuck, we need to get moving physically in order to get unstuck mentally.
That chapter is one of the reasons I garden. It’s one of the reasons I build in time to do the dishes in the middle of my day. It’s one of the reasons why, when things are really bad inside my head, Forrest will come out for lunch and see me preparing to paint a room in our house yet another outrageous color.
If I sit and try to think, I circle the drain. But if I’m moving, even doing something as simple as a walk, those annoying ruts are interrupted by other thoughts - thoughts like, “Damn, this hill is steeper than I thought,” and “Oh, they tore down that cute house I liked.” And those interruptions pause my rage and regret for just long enough to maybe provide a new path to walk down.
A path like, “I can’t believe I forgot to order the paint stripper. Who does that? Remember that meme about going to Home Depot ten times for every DIY project. Well, if there’s a meme about it, maybe it’s just a thing that people do.”
Or, more helpfully, a path like, “Ok, this plan didn’t work. Why did I choose it in the first place?”
And by the time I’ve gotten back to my yard, I’m sweaty and gross and tired but also ready to just admire the morning glories that have taken over my yard instead of feeling like the worst gardener ever for just giving up fighting them sometime in August.
I’m putting this post in the book section of my blog because this has been the hardest part of being a writer, keeping my own brain in check. There’s a lot of alone time and a lot of time wondering if any of this is real work at all or if it’s all just a narcissistic fever dream. You get into it wanting to create magic and then you find yourself spending a half hour comparing two different synonyms for the word “blonde” and it all feels like it went off the rails somewhere. But then something as stupid as a walk sorts everything back into its proper places and it’s hard to admit it but maybe that’s as close to magic as I’m going to get today. Then again, 30 minutes of sappy music and things are back on track? Maybe that’s not so bad, as magic tricks go.
