Just over a year ago, I sat down to start my daily writing practice – again. Over the years I have started and not finished hundreds of different programs. Way way back I tried to do Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for 12 weeks. After starting again at Day One over and over and over again, I finally gave up. Her book still sits on my shelf waiting for me to have the gumption to start again. I followed her with many other books that promised 30 days to… or 40 days to… or 28 days too… and didn’t finish a single one.
So there I was on the 27th of July, 2017, wondering for the millionth time what was wrong with me and why I couldn’t just do what I set out to do. All I wanted to do was show up for another 30 day writing practice that one of my books told me would change my life but I couldn’t. Other people seem to be able to show up and to do things over and over again, why not me?
Not getting any answers from my own muddled psyche, I decided to take this question to my Guides. (I have to tell you that I rarely do this and when I do I rarely get an answer. I am not someone who sees her Guides or can visualize, so I must have been desperate to try.) I sat down and did one of my own guided meditations and actually had the sense of sitting at the feet of one of my Guides! Desperate, I asked them what was wrong with me?
My answer? “Stop fucking around and show up.”
I guess I asked for it! And they meant it, because over the next 24 hours, I saw or heard or read the first three words four more times. “Stop fucking around…”
The next morning I counted up and discovered that it was then 90 days until my birthday, so I told myself to show up at the page for those 90 days. And it did it. I did it. I didn’t even Instagram Day One. Inexplicably, I showed up every single day for 90 days. I just did it.
When I got to 90 days, I discovered that I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to keep going to see where else I could go, so I kept writing. And kept writing. And kept writing.
One morning I woke up to my heart racing and I realized that I wasn’t positive that I had written the day before. I leaped out of bed to check and even reading the previous days’ pages, I couldn’t figure it out. I felt sick. The question loomed: should I go back and count every day? Did I have to start again?
Historically this would have knocked me and I would have given up, eventually starting on Day One again, this time carrying a bit more shame and a bit more weight. But I looked at myself in the mirror and I decided that I could either focus on the one questionable day, or I could focus on the hundreds of days when I had shown up. I chose to just pick up my pen and keep going.
People have asked me what I do, and the answer is quite simple: I show up and write three pages. Over the first month, the pages changed from just writing to being a letter to my Guides, to being a letter to God. I have also written to the Mystery, the Magic, the Universe, Source, but after that first month or so, God stuck. I figured I’d just go to the top.
What do I do? I show up. I have written in airports and in hotels; written during my retreat, on moving day, on Christmas morning, and by candlelight during power outages. I have written when I was sick, when I was well, when I was busy. I have written at 4:00am because I knew I wasn’t going to have any other time that day, and I have written at 11:30pm because I hauled myself out of bed when I remembered that I hadn’t done it yet.
I show up. I show up even when I don’t fee like it. I show up when I don’t want to. I show up when I bore myself by writing the same thing every day for a week. I show up when I want to throw the book across the room. I show up, ready or not.
Over the course of this year I have discovered one thing: the practice isn’t the writing. The practice isn’t the 90 days or the 250 days or the 300 days. The practice isn’t hitting 365 or even 1000.
The practice is showing up, pen in hand, today. Showing up today is the only thing that matters.
It’s this lesson that has changed my life.
What can you do for yourself today? How can you show up for yourself today?
The other thing that I have learned is from the ‘stop fucking around’ part of the message, but this email has gotten very long, so I’ll post that on day 365.
What can you do for yourself today? How can you show up for yourself today? Just today.
Today is all that matters.
with so much love,
