Latitude

It’s been almost a month since Easter and I have allowed myself to neglect my writing once more.  It has been a very involved time with the new board position at my church.  When I took on the role, I had no idea how much of my thinking time this stuff would take up.  I have found that there have been a number of mornings where I have sat down to write and I have instead been sidetracked by praying about something or beginning an email.

The emails are something else.  I don’t mean the volume – I mean the time it takes me to write them.  I find it challenging to write effectively to a group of people.  I have come to the conclusion that email is a limited form of communication.  There have been so many times when I have realized that what I’m trying to do with an email would be done so much more effectively with a conversation, either in person or on the phone.  But when it comes to communicating with a group you can’t just call them all on the phone at once and it’s never easy to find the time to meet.

I also feel like calling someone out of the blue is…almost rude now.  I feel like email and social media has buffered our communication so that we are able to receive these messages at our leisure and can respond to them after some thought.  It feels so immediate and intrusive to just call someone on the phone.  This is probably just my issue, but I feel it.  It holds me back from just calling people.  Using the phone feels more intimate now than it used to.

So I sit down with these things to say and I write out my thoughts and then I read them and write them out again or put the email away.  It can take me hours or even days to write an email.  I’m not working at it the whole time, but once I start, it doesn’t always leave my mind until I can send it off.

So all this meant that I have unintentionally given myself a pass on posting on the blog, which feels frustrating to me once I actually sit down to post.  I lose the rhythm of it and I lose the closeness and I really appreciated that over the course of Lent as I was posting nearly every day.

On the matter of trying to finish my book by the end of June, I have been moving slowly but I have begun to act on some things.  I started taking some time over my lunch to find a place where I can work on the book for half an hour to forty-five minutes every day.  This is so helpful.  It is a way to stake out some of my brain space against other matters.  It is allowing me to have some continuity in my thinking which has been a challenge in the past.  It’s so obvious, and yet when it comes to time it’s hard to make it happen.

It’s been quiet at work so it’s been easy to take those lunches to write, so hopefully once things pick up again at work I’ll be able to hold on to the habit.  It wasn’t easy for me to get going so hopefully now that I am, I can maintain the momentum.

I find that it’s hard to find a good place to write over lunch.  I don’t want to stay in my office because if someone wants something, my writing time would be interrupted.  It would be the same with the lunch room.  People wouldn’t want to talk to me about work, but conversations happen in the lunch room.  it’s not typically a quiet study area nor should it be.

So then the challenge is that I’m trying to find a good spot to write during lunch hour in a very busy downtown area.  There’s a big food court downstairs but it’s expected that you’re going to get some food and eat and go.  There are signs prohibiting people from doing what it is that I’m trying to do.  So I find a bench and I sit there with my laptop on my lap.  Hey, that’s where the name came from!  It’s not perfect, but it works.  It feels good.

Once more, if I’m going to be complaining about time or about things I want to get done, the best thing to do is make a resolution and to start carving out space to work at it.  Nobody wants to hear me moan about these things, or read about it either.

So, while I do admit that the latitude I have given myself on this blog is frustrating, I feel good about the ways that I’m making good use of time for other things in other areas.  It feels important.  All that being said, it’s 11:23 on a Friday night and I’m very tired.  The house is quiet and even Donald Trump is probably in bed at this stage, so maybe it would be good for me to go as well.

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