Percolating

Places to Percolate

I woke last Saturday with a sense of shock. I was done; I had turned in my grades. I was looking at six months without teaching. Vertigo -- immediate, unprecedented. I've been working in some way or another since I started babysitting at 12 years old. I had summer breaks in college and for my first few years of teaching, and years ago I had a quarter-long sabbatical to write about Sebastian Barry closely followed by another one to work on the breast-cancer memoir that I wrote with my mother.  But that was 16 years ago. Since then I've been teaching straight, including summers, without a break.

At the end of every quarter I turn in my grades and breathe a sigh of relief. Then I wake the next morning and think about prepping. It's who I am. It's how I've lived. I can't imagine what it's like not thinking about what I'm going to do for my next set of classes -- tweaking curriculum, adding a new activity, figuring out state-of-the-art software. So a moment of giddy joy on Saturday turned almost immediately into a kind of panic. But before I could plunge too deeply into the void, Azalea came in to remind me we were going Christmas tree catching the next day and I was able to focus my energy on the familiar -- getting out the decorations, moving things around to make room for the tree, not-thinking not-thinking not-thinking about having nothing to do for six months.

What I know about myself is that the best way for me to write is to not write. I have to do nothing* in order to write freely. It's how I think. And it's impossible to do enough nothing when I'm working.

So Saturday I prepped for the Christmas tree, and Sunday we went and chopped down our Charlie Brown tree in the woods in a wee bit of a snow storm, then drank hot chocolate with Peppermint Schnapps to get warm before the drive home, and Monday I paid bills and cleaned things and continued not to think about the nothing that is waiting for me, and Tuesday -- which is today -- I ran on the ditch bank through snapping cold air, feet breaking through the thin crust on the snow that fell last week, and finally allowed myself to think about the nothing.

And this evening, after Azalea left to hang with her boyfriend, I made a plan. Right now I have a journal where I will write morning pages, and I will have this blog which is my baby-step move towards fulfilling my sabbatical promise. And tomorrow I will ask the Peoples of the Internets what you all think about how a writer who writes best by doing nothing can do something to engage with readers in the new world beyond the garret. 

For the moment, that's enough. I await your suggestions, peeps.

*And by "nothing," I mean I need time to be mindless, walking, running, cleaning the house, riding (for although riding itself is mindful, many of the chores around riding allow space for that "nothing" in which writing develops).