One Year of Writing Slowly

A year ago this week, I sat down to write the first piece for this site. It was about the first breath of the morning. I did not know if I would write a second piece. I did not know if anyone would read either of them.

A year later, there are about two hundred pieces here. Some long, most short. Some, I am proud of. Many, I am simply glad to have written. A few I would write differently now — but I am leaving them, because the trace of how the writing changed is part of what the year was.

I want to write a small note about what a year of writing slowly has been.

What it has not been

It has not been a great commercial success. Some of the long pieces have made their way into corners of the internet and have been read by more people than I expected. Most have not. I am not, after a year, a writer with a brand. The newsletter has a few hundred readers, most of whom I am quietly grateful for, none of whom I would trade for a few thousand readers I did not know.

I do not say this with regret. I say it with relief.

It has also not been an unbroken practice. There were three weeks last summer when I did not write a single word, and felt guilty about it, until I remembered that the piece I would have produced in that fatigue would not have been worth reading. The silence was the work, that month.

What it has been

It has been a small daily appointment with attention. Most mornings, before the rest of the day became loud, I have sat with a notebook and a cup of tea and watched the same window. I have written down the small thing the morning was offering. Sometimes the thing became a piece. Sometimes it became a sentence in a piece weeks later. Sometimes it just became a quiet morning.

It has been an education in finding more in less. The shortest pieces here — the daily one-paragraph drips — were the hardest to write. The long pieces forgive you for over-explaining. The short ones do not. Writing them taught me, slowly, that most of what I had been over-explaining could be cut.

It has been a discipline of returning. There were many mornings I did not want to write. The mind was loud, the chair was wrong, the cup was cold. Sit anyway. Write anyway. Most of the work happened on those mornings, not on the inspired ones.

It has been a friendship — not a famous one, but a real one — with the few hundred of you who have read along. Some of you have written back. A few of those replies are folded into a small drawer of letters I will keep. They are some of the best things I have ever received in my life.

What I have learned

The slow practice is real. It does not announce itself. You do it for a season, and a season, and a season, and then one morning you notice you are different. Not transformed. Not healed of every difficulty. Just slightly less reactive, slightly more present, slightly more available to the people you love.

The soil has been doing its work the whole time.

I am, at the end of one year, grateful in ways I do not know how to say.

I am also more sure than I was that the project — small letters, slow practice, the boring path of attention — is worth continuing.

So the second year begins. The same window. The same chair. The same cup.

If you are one of the few who has read this far: thank you. The writing has been better for the existence of an audience that was reading slowly, the way it was being written.

May the year ahead be a kind one for you. May you have, in it, more breath, more pause, more honest difficulty, and more of the small green points that arrive after the warm rain.

Sit well this week.

— nomind