Do you ever read something, or see a piece of art, and feel so deeply affected, that you think, “I want to write! I want to make art!”? This happens to me all the time, every day. I want to spend as much of my life as possible feeling the way I feel when I am moved by art, and so the natural progression is that I should make art myself.
The problem — or, one of the several problems — is that I’m not an artist. I will never be a writer like the writers I admire; I don’t have grand ideas for fictions or essays, nor the patience develop them. I blog and I journal for the pleasure of the act of writing, and that is enough. I have accepted this. I will not be a Donna Tartt or a Zadie Smith or any of the masters of language and storytelling I so admire, and that is okay. To enjoy anything for the act of doing it rather than for the product it creates is a gift.
But I do want to create. I crave it. Over the past few weeks I’ve been edging towards drawing again. There’s more daylight now. I could do it at the end of my workday to unwind. Yet I haven’t. At the end of the day, I want quiet: a quiet brain. At the end of the day, I often feel the most I can do is to stand at the window and look out, or to pick up the deck of cards and play a couple of rounds of solitaire.
It seems it would also be easy to draw, if only I could remember to. I don’t have to be good. Maybe that’s what’s stopping me — it feels like I need energy to draw because it will take effort to be decent at it and not get frustrated.
When I was in Halifax last week for a work meetup, we went to an art museum together. I was struck by the joy in one of the artist’s works, Maud Lewis. When I looked at her paintings, the overwhelming feeling I felt was merriment. This woman felt free when she made this. She had fun with paint. I want to relax and be free and just have fun with pens and pencils and maybe one day paint.
I met with my coach last week and shared, “I’m thinking about work too much. It keeps me up at night. I’ve started using my morning Me time to log in early and take care of stuff that’s on my mind so I can get it off my plate.”
One reason for doing this — for logging in early and thinking about work all the time — is that I’m engaged with what I’m doing, which is a good thing. I’m learning exciting things. I’m having fun with the people I work with. And I am really proud of what the teams I’m on are doing.
But more work begets more work, and by logging on early or logging off late, I create a vicious frenetic cycle of having to keep up with the extra work I’ve generated for myself by doing so. I make mistakes. My brain tires. Meanwhile, I don’t journal. I don’t blog. I don’t draw or look out the window at birds. My sleep suffers.
I told my coach about all of this. I told her that in order to do good work and not feel resentful of neglecting the things that nourish me, I need to figure this out. I told her I want to create boundaries so that I turn my work brain off to recharge. “Ugh, you’re probably going to tell me to meditate,” I said. She said not necessarily. Not in the sense of sitting on a cushion. But in the sense of being mindful and noticing when I’m thinking about work? Yes.
She suggested I start simple. If I want to preserve my morning time for quiet — for journaling, for reading, for looking out the window — I need to resist logging on to work before I intend for my work day to start. If I pull out my laptop to blog, I need to not “check Slack real quick” like I almost did when I lifted the cover today to write this post.
I’ve practiced all this week. It’s been hard. When I catch myself thinking about work outside of work hours, I tell myself, “I can think about this at 8am tomorrow.” If it’s something I need to remember and that’s why it’s bothering me, I set myself a reminder in a personal Slack with girlfriends.
It’s been hard but it’s also been wonderful. Yesterday morning I sat by the window and watched a robin pull fibers out of the shredded bark mulch and swoop under the stairs to add them to a nest. I watched him spar with another male to defend his territory — they twirled aggressively in the air, whipping their wings, until one finally chased the other off and the fat female came hopping out to say yeah, get out of here. Meanwhile two goldfinches courted down by the mailbox. The pear trees have filled out with chartreuse leaves, and the pink dogwoods raise their salmon colored flowers to the sun.
This morning, a robin again hops around in the flower bed, gathering nest materials. I’m writing a blog post. I’ll read a bit when I’m done. And at work? My brain has felt fresher each day thanks to the rest.
Today I board a flight for my annual girls’ weekend, and I could not be more ready. I realized this morning that I haven’t taken more than a long weekend off from work since I returned from my sabbatical in July. I felt a huge release yesterday at the end of my work day, when I could finally turn my brain off. I probably shouldn’t have waited this long.
March is here, and I am ready for it. I started running again once it warmed up a little bit. I ran outside 3 or 4 times in the past couple of weeks, in short sleeves, and the warm sun on my arms has been glorious. Right now, our windows are open, and I sit in our living room in long sleeves, with a blanket and a cat on my lap, while I listen to birds twitter outside.
The snowdrops and purple crocuses are in bloom at the top of the hill, and I pruned the rose bushes last weekend. I’m not taking a full week off of work for my girls weekend, but at the end of March I will: I’ve put my annual gardening vacation on the calendar. As the days lengthen and the ground warms, I stand at the back door and plan.
Or, I try to plan. For five years, I’ve had a beautiful bed of echinacea in the back garden. Nothing bothered it: not rabbits, not deer. It filled in with broad green leaves by mid-summer, bloomed in magenta coneflowers in July and August, and dried down to spiky seed heads that goldfinches perch and preen on in September and October. Last year, a groundhog found my beautiful bountiful bed and trampled it. It ate all the leaves so that nothing was left but stems, then crushed the stems beneath its gallumping gait. I adore the groundhog, and also, I want my flowers. I don’t know how to solve this problem.
But as I mentioned at the top, my brain is currently off, so I’m not going to think about that now. Right now I’m going to make myself some snacks for the flight, pet the purring cat on my lap, and listen to the birds.
Over the holidays, when I worked most days and my team encouraged me to take time off, I promised them and myself that I’d take a day off in January instead. Today is that day.
Today is also a day that an epic winter storm is bearing down on us, though you’d never know from the sunny sky. For my day off, I’d planned to swim at 7am instead of 5:30, and then to toodle around our tiny downtown. Get some coffee. Walk to the book store. Then go home and relax on the new love seat with a book, or maybe, if I’m lucky, thanks to our son who gave me a subscription for Christmas, with the latest issue of The New Yorker if it lands in our mailbox today. I hope I have it in hand when the weather arrives.
And I did all of those morning things. I just inserted a few other things as well. Like find all of our power banks and charge them. Dust off the camp stove, test if it still works, buy fuel. Stock up on cat food, bring in firewood, wash and dry clothes, grind coffee (I still need to do this one). Marvel at the line out the door at the hardware store for snow shovels, salt, and generators. Consider what’s sold out at the grocery store: water, tortilla chips, yogurt. Hope we have enough food and firewood if we lose power, and our whole region loses power, and we have to go several days with high temperatures in the teens and no heat or range or oven or hot water.
It’s strange knowing this storm is coming and then also just going about my regular day. It’s so pretty out! I added a couple of walking stops on my little morning jaunt from the coffee shop to the book store. Our CEO gave us homework this week to go to a museum. At first I thought, We don’t have a museum in town. How will I do this?
Then I remembered the performing arts center sometimes has exhibits, and there’s a historic house in town that’s been converted into a local history museum that sometimes has art.
After I drank my coffee with the paper — an actual newspaper! I pick them up sometimes now after reading Beth Macy’s Paper Girl — I bundled up and began my walk to the other side of town where the book store is. I stopped in the performing arts center, but it was between exhibits, so I just appreciated the architecture for a few minutes, and the airy space full of light.
Next I stopped at the Alexander Black House. I’ve passed this building at least a thousand times in the however many years we’ve lived here.
14. That’s how many years.
Anyway, this house is unusual for this town — the architecture is unlike anything else here — and at least half of those thousand times that I’ve passed it, I’ve thought, I wonder what it’s like in there? Well today I found out because I went in.
Alexander Black House
Inside, a local high school exhibited artwork — photographs, block prints, paintings — and I loved putting the pieces together of “They must have had an assignment about eyes” and seeing the different interpretations from these creative minds.
My favorite part of the museum was a room restored to look like it would have in the early 1900s when it was lived in. Look at the wallpaper! I just love it. Someone should bring wallpaper back.
Wallpaper, dado rail, and wainscoting
Now I’m back home with a blanket on my lap, a hot cup of orange tea, and the sun shining through the window. Our forecast has gone from a prediction of 2 feet of snow to now just 4-9 inches, but of snow, sleet, and ice. The latter will be heavy and treacherous. We don’t need to drive, thankfully, but the weight of ice is bad news for downed power lines.
I want to bring in just a little more firewood, then cover the woodpile with a tarp. I’m hoping all these preparations won’t been necessary. It’s really not fun to lose electricity in subarctic temperatures. My favorite part of every day in winter is climbing into our warm bed after turning on our heated mattress pad. It’s so luxurious to preheat the sheets! We can’t do that without power. We can pull camp mattresses and sleeping bags next to the fireplace though.
Daily writing prompt
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
At the very end of my sabbatical, I listened to a short story on the New Yorker‘s Writer’s Voice podcast. “The Silence” by Zadie Smith. I’m pretty sure my mouth fell open while I listened. I loved it so much. The next day, I drove to Barnes & Noble and bought the July 7 & 14 issue, paid the full $9.99 cover price, because I wanted a hard copy of this story in my possession. The story is itself wonderful, but what I wanted to be able to access was a specific passage that stopped me in my tracks:
Beautiful girls were passing by her right now, as she sat on this bench, and she thought that she’d been totally right all those years ago: she had been precious, and so were these girls. Everyone talks about the beauty of nature, but people are far more beautiful. So Sharon felt, even if she no longer had the words to express it. Nature is only a backdrop, like scenery at the theatre, and all the man-made objects only props. People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose.
People are the beauty and the light and the point and the purpose. Even if you had the glory of unspoiled nature, even if you had all the art and stories and music of all the humans who came before you, being alone at the end of the world would be devastatingly, crushingly lonely. None of it means anything without other souls to share it with. Even if you don’t know them. Even if they’re different from you.
Last year I made an effort to get out in the world more. I am a creature of habit and I work from home, so it’s easy for me to go days without interacting in physical space with other people. But last year I extended my lap time at the pool and have struck up small friendships with other regulars there. I shop at our local book store and try to have coffee at a local coffee shop once a week. With my family and alone, we quietly built habits of going book stores, art museums, and jazz shows where we were surrounded by people appreciating the marvelous architecture, literature, paintings, sculptures, and music that fellow humans had created.
This year I want to keep those habits going, the habits of engaging with others in shared physical space. That feels like a weird thing to say. I guess it’s not that weird after COVID, but I’ve been working remotely for 10 years, and all my closest friends live far away. I have deep connections with people who don’t live near me thanks to modern technology, but I want to also share space — the sounds of splashing or of crockery clinking, temperatures that require bundling up or shedding sweaters, scents in the air, three dimensions of sitting beside each other or seeing an animal race across the street, food and drink, all five senses.
I’m joining a book club this year, which is a step in the right direction of building community in my community. Maybe I’ll see if anyone at the pool wants to go out for coffee some time. It might be fun to find a trivia night, too. Whatever I do, I want to connect more with people outside of my computer in 2026.
I’ve been traveling a lot the past few weeks — Albuquerque for my cousin’s wedding, Ireland for a leadership meetup for work, New York City for fun with my husband, and Spain for our operations team meetup. The travel was exciting, but I’m glad to finally be home. With the sniffles, but home.
I’ve felt frazzled over the past few weeks with all of the travel, Thanksgiving, both kids’ birthdays, lots of new stuff at work, and Christmas on the way. My brain has been working overtime and I haven’t had the creative energy to write or blog. I feel that frazzle easing a bit now as I move some things to the completed column.
White lights twinkle on our Christmas tree and front porch rail. Snow glitters on the ground. We’ve brought the holiday decorations out of storage, and steam rises from a reindeer coffee mug by my side. Our daughter is asleep in her bed here at home. She drove up yesterday from Florida, her third semester of college complete, and opened birthday presents at 9:30 last night after starting the day with an exam then driving 10 hours. Her birthday was Wednesday, and it was the first time in her life we haven’t been with her for it. She had a fun day with friends in St. Augustine, so it’s not a sad thing. Just weird. For us.
One cat lays on my lapboard, snuggled against my belly with her chin resting on my forearm as I type; the other lays on the seat cushion behind me. We had a fire last night, and this morning I’m warm in my soft sweatshirt, sweatpants, and thick wool socks. I am cozy. I can feel my body relaxing into the beauty of winter and Christmas. With one of our babies here at home and the other on his way in a few days, my heart feels peace.
Butterfly Mind 