Keeping the vow
Today marks three years since I made a vow to myself to write every day, no matter what. And I am proud to say that I’ve kept it. Every day since this date in 2005, a long holiday weekend like this one, I have let no day pass without writing.
I’ve written daily through times of stress, illness, and bone-tiredness; through cross-country travel, conferences, and vacations; after work even when work ran late into the evening, and when everybody else was taking a chill day; while my husband underwent cancer surgery, while visiting him every day in the hospital, and while seeing him through his long recovery; through my mother’s lingering decline over months and years, through her death three months ago, and through the family’s gathering for her funeral; at children’s birthdays and graduations and romantic crises, at Thanksgivings and Christmases and New Years, in up times, down times, times of clear, flowing inspiration and times of dusty mental drought: every day I’ve produced words in some sort of order, with some sort of coherence and having some sort of creative idea behind them, however lame. Every day.
A pledge was the only way. By nature I am lazy and undisciplined. I am not the writer who’ll rise at seven, go for a run, take a shower, and then settle down to work from nine to noon and one to four, faithfully sending out manuscripts on schedule to their expectant publishers, as some say they do, and who’s to contradict them? Never mind that I have a full-time job that routinely runneth over the forty-hour cup, I could never keep to a regimen like that for any purpose. It would bring out all my rebellious instincts, and pretty soon I’d be sneaking around behind my back and trying to get away without doing something I wanted me to do just to spite me for trying to make me do it. A lot of my life goes like that.
But vows are practically sacred. The teeth of that promise, a promise to myself, nip at my ankles like a herd dog’s and keep me in line. Some days I can last for only ten minutes. Some days, exhausted, I open a document that needs work and change two words. Some days, completely at a loss, I write in my writing journal about how much at a loss and how frustrated I am. (Those entries can go on for pages.) But I write something, even if all I do the next day is turn around and delete it. It’s doing it without fail that matters.
Although I have yet to see droppings from the pigeon of success ornamenting the windshield of my life, I regard those three years of unbroken commitment as a genuine accomplishment. After so long, I’m not about to blow it now.
This was all I did today. Does it count? Sure does.
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