Resetting the clock, once again.

Here I am. Once again.

Yes, despite all my good intentions, it has been 3 months since I posted. Instead of just jumping into the next thing on my mind as if no time has gone by, I wanted to do a quick post letting folks know that, yes, I am still alive and yes, I still plan on posting regularly here.

The transition from having external structures and motivations for “getting things done” (both with my work with Brave Writer and with raising and homeschooling my kids) to having to develop internal structures and motivations was always going to be a tricky one for me (especially as an Enneagram Type 9).

I will admit that I thought that I would have had it worked out by now. Though in retrospect, I have no idea why I would think that, given that this is how I’ve been my whole life. So maybe thinking it would just disappear was a bit of wishful thinking.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem “filling up my days” or “finding things to do”. That part is easy. The tricky part is identifying what my priorities are (and how to get them done) when there are not a lot of pressing “have tos” in my life any more.

I also get that some of you might be rolling your eyes, wishing that you could have similar problems. But truthfully, even when I had more external constraints on my time, identifying my priorities was still something that I wrestled with. So my guess is that while my current situation may be different than yours, the underlying issues I’m wrestling with may feel familiar.

The main issue that I wrestle with is how easy it is for me to “lose the thread” of what I want to be doing. Since many of the things that I want to do (such as my writing and my photography) often take more time to come together, there are lots of opportunities for distraction as I work on projects. When combined with little outside pressure to keep going, it is easy for inertia to set in.

Of course, many of these “distractions” are simply life happening. In the past 3 months, there has been a lot going on. I’ve been volunteering with the Friends of Duncan Library, helping maintain their website and doing PR for the April library book sale. I’ve also been doing housing advocacy work with the YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and we are in the middle of mayoral and city council elections.

Toward the end of April, Kyle headed off, once again car camping his way across the country to his latest job as a wildlife tech at Rydell Wildlife Refuge in NW Minnesota (where he is living in a bunkhouse on the refuge.)

The biggest life distraction is that I threw my back/hip out in late April and only recently after 5+ weeks of not being able to be comfortably upright for long periods of time am I finally feeling like I’m getting back to some semblance of “normal.” Definitely more on that in a future post

I have so many ideas of what I want to write about—more about my house, life here in Alexandria, my cats, my photography, books I’m reading, organizing and living in a small home, growing older, thoughts on homeschooling now that I am several years out, parenting young adults. And the main throughput of my life: learning how to work with and better understand myself and others.

I’m also very curious to look back on my life in relationship to the world we live in now. I just turned 56 yesterday and I am feeling more and more as if I am “of a different generation”. The world I came of age in is so different than the world my kids are coming of age in. I see resistance and push back to not only ideas that I accepted as part of the way the world worked (which I am glad to see!) but also to ideas that I deeply valued (especially around parenting.) My goal as I get older is to stay curious and intellectually nimble (and to avoid getting to the place where all I want to do is yell about kids these days needing to stay off my lawn!)

So we will see! I appreciate those of you who are still here despite my posting inconsistency. We’ll see what this attempt at learning to work with my natural proclivities reveals. There is part of me that wants to say that if I have not been able to make writing here “work” yet, then maybe I should just let it go. But I’m just not quite ready to do that yet.

So until then, I will keep experimenting and see what comes up in the process.