The musician famously said, “When I miss a day of practice, I notice. When I miss two days, the critics notice. When I miss three days, the audience notices.”
Miss too many more days, and you almost have to start over again. The momentum — gained by weeks, months, or years of daily practice — is lost, or at least misplaced.
The callouses earned by playing guitar every day have softened. The ability to leap right back into the story you were writing is crippled. The now-unfamiliar clay doesn’t respond to your fingers.
Before you’re tempted to walk away forever, you have to plant yourself back in the chair knowing you have to endure the exertion of inertia-busting.
You push against the boulder and push and push with no discernible result until you move it an inch — but don’t quit there because it’s only an inch. You need to keep pushing, and soon it moves another inch, and then two inches and a foot and more, until it’s where you were when you stopped practicing.
Fret not that you lost time to inertia; that’s a sure way to lose more time.
Start a new roll and journey from there. Make a new routine, perhaps better than the old one, tempered by what you learned by misplacing the routine in the first place.