Days of blank pages

© Alexei Poselenov | Dreamstime.com

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.

Published by WarrenBluhm

Wordsmith and podcaster, Warren is a reporter, editor and storyteller who lives near the shores of Green Bay with his wife, two golden retrievers, Dejah and Summer, and Blackberry, an insistent cat. Author of It's Going to Be All Right, Echoes of Freedom Past, Full, Refuse to be Afraid, Gladness is Infectious, 24 flashes, How to Play a Blue Guitar, Myke Phoenix: The Complete Novelettes, A Bridge at Crossroads, The Imaginary Bomb, A Scream of Consciousness, and The Imaginary Revolution.

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