I've been a bit wobbly, finding my land legs again.

Or maybe my regular-usual legs are my sea legs. Maybe I'm usually adrift, out voyaging in an inward fashion, and the concrete trips here and there, the actual vagabonding, are my trips ashore, where I land hard, and, finding the land hard, can hardly walk.

Either way, it has been an interesting process this past week or so, getting back into the groove I'd just begun to establish before I hit the road.

We discussed grooves today in my now-Tuesday morning writing group: what are habits and rituals and patterns? And what does it mean if you make having no habits/rituals/patterns your habit/ritual/pattern? Is that even possible, or do we just not have our radar tuned in properly to pick up on them? Does it take a major happening, or maybe a series of minor ones, plus one to tip us, to make us see them well enough to consider changing them?

Not all rituals are bad, of course. Most aren't, or at least, not until they've outlived their usefulness in our lives. If you had to think through every process you've learned since you started learning things, just driving to the 7-11 for a Big Gulp would be an odyssey of epic proportions. (I know; it was a joke, see?)

The reason I take classes and seek out accountability partners and hire professionals to help me untangle my brain and redirect my chi and see my stuff clearly enough to decide what should stay and what should go is because I can't see it all by myself. Not all at once. Not when it matters. And I'm someone who sees a fair amount. What I could not see about Monday's post, though, is what my colleagues pointed out in Tuesday's workshop: that I'd left some things hanging, that I'd missed some opportunities. I mean, I knew these things; I know I'm missing opportunities and dropping threads of ideas all over the place. These are not polished essays I write, but blog posts. For the most part, I write them in one shot, straight through, with very little editing. The true miracle is when one works.

I would like to write a whole post about trixercise, because I think that this idea of true discovery coming from these three things, a cordoning off, a distancing, and a mindful attention throughout the process, might be a big and a useful enough idea to warrant deeper and more thoughtful explanation. Just not today. Because I write this at the end of a day where I'd thought I'd be posting a breezy instructional video, not wrassling for three hours with firmware upgrades, bad light and goddamn .AVI files.

In the meantime, I will settle for a wrap-up of discoveries from the day:

Your writing needs to be done first, or you're done for.
You can make a dent in your gnarliest issue if you chip away at it for a half-hour per day.
Just because pain is dormant doesn't mean it's over.
Knowing there is a little chopped liver left in the fridge is a great comfort.
Setting yourself a hard in and hard out may be the self-employed's greatest self-gift.

May we both continue to uncover many wonderful things moving forward...

xxx
c

Image by IntangibleArts via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.