First comes doubt …
Saturday, May 9th, 2015Tin left for Croatia, a land where supposedly there are no rules. It has taken every waking minute to bring him back down to earth, a place with many rules. I read recently that if you were raised middle class that you constantly have this feeling that you have to be working and that enough is never enough. Last year, i was ramping up to serious warp speed having acquired several projects at once to keep my head above water and food in the fridge. It was madness, and it put a serious project – my book – on the back burner.
This year started off differently; there has been no ramping up, there has been instead a blood letting. Projects disintegrating, rates of pay scaling back, and days where the faith walk has felt more like the Bataan Death March. I’ve come to a clearer vision of how I want my future to unfold – I see it, I can almost feel it, and yet, I still rock myself to sleep at night thinking that I’ve just lost my mind. “It’s these times when you are about to make a great leap that the greatest confusion and self-doubt enters your mind,” my friend said to me yesterday. She had brought over the pieces of her working life on a note paper that she wanted me to form into a c.v. for a job she is applying for. This is the same friend who walked around the Big Lake with me a couple of years ago and helped me seal the LaLa’s fate.
For this reason, yesterday I told someone who was offering me work that I did not want onesies and twosies. I am writing a book that I believe will have an impact on the way we parent our children. I am working at issues that matter to me – race and reconciliation, acknowledging the crisis in this country, and sowing seeds of change. Put me to work at something that I can get behind, otherwise I am writing my book. I gave the end of June as a deadline – that’s crazy – ludicrous – I have a six year old, whose disobedience has been monumental since he returned from Croatia – all of my attention has been to get him back on track, back to reality, back where he understands his boundaries – all while I’m trying to blow up mine?
What?
I’ve wrestled with sleep because my faith is not powerful enough, but I keep getting up and believing in this vision. I keep working at it. And now I’m starting to eliminate those things and those projects that are not helping me reach it. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.
This year, I wont go on my Nantucket girl’s trip, even though through great generosity my friend actually offered to pay for it. Between now and the end of June, I am working on a deadline to flesh out each chapter of my book so that I will be ready. Next Saturday I’m being interviewed about my book. They say if you speak it, it will happen. Well, books don’t happen, they grow inside of you into they are spilling out all over the place and causing insomnia and making everything else seem like a waste of time. I have a framed stencil that my mother-in-law of years ago gave me in my office – it says: All That Man Has Ever Thought Or Done is Preserved As If By Magic In Books.
The internet is supposed to implode in six to eight years. I told this to my good friend and she said, “Oh, I hope so.” But we all know that predicting a digital future in six to eight years is ridiculous. Predicting a human’s life in one day is absurd. Right now, a book is being born and survival is being wrought from piece meal paying projects. This will work out. If you have been paying attention for the last ten years that I have written this blog, you know one thing for certain, a change is gonna come, of that I have no doubt.
