I got a text this week that had four magical words in it. They were the same four words that had inspired me in the past to write a blog, so I searched my files and found that it was almost exactly a year ago, at Christmas, that a simple phrase from a friend became an unexpected gift. What were those words? Read on to find out:
Happy Holidays! I receive regular emails from a wonderful resource called The Daily Flame. They arrive like love letters full of guidance and inspiration from my “inner pilot light.” The one I got this week was so sublimely perfect and expresses my sentiments so well that I decided to share it here.
Consider this a sort of Santa swap, where I’m re-gifting these words to you.
My sister and her teenage son were visiting from Colorado. We were walking back from the coffee shop near my house when I looked down and there it was—a hundred-dollar bill, waiting patiently on the pavement for me to leisurely bend over and pick it up. The two of them hadn’t seen it and they were astonished and envious that I had.
The extra cash was just what I needed. It allowed me to take us all out to dinner and buy some birthday gifts for my nephew.
My ex-husband and his new wife were a picture-perfect couple. So much so that they were photographed for the cover of Crain’s Chicago Business magazine. They were featured in an article about how stepparents are either relegated to support status or simply invisible.
But his new wife wasn’t invisible. She was posed with him and our three children on the front steps of my house—sorry, now their house—as if she had lived there for more than two months, as if she had been mothering my children for years. She was being interviewed because she started a support group for other women like her.
I’m so grateful for the friends, old and new, who came to my book signing at Women and Children First Bookstore! I was especially surprised to see a few faces I had not seen in fifteen or twenty years; the spark of recognition in meeting again was indescribable.
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? A spark of recognition.
I write in pursuit of it. I read in search of it. I connect with friends for the joy of it.
This week the word perseverance has been scratching at me, wanting to be written about. It’s pestered me with all the doggedness you would expect from it. So here I am, struggling to come up with an opening story to illustrate what it means to persevere and why it interests me.
I don’t have a story. But that in itself is perfect. Because the essence of perseverance isn’t in the moment of triumph, realization, or reward. It’s not about the outcome. It is, by definition, the steady persistence in a course of action—and here’s the best part—in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.
I was driving in the car with my 16-year-old son when I realized I had nothing to write about this week.
“I have no ideas for my blog,” I told him. “I’m drawing a complete blank.”
“Why don’t you write about the movie you went to?” he said, referring to Bohemian Rhapsody. “You liked that.”
It was just past 6:30 and the party started at 7:00. There were boxes of books and tablecloths and candles and wine to be unloaded, food to be unpacked and beautifully arranged, microphones and music and smartphones to hook up.
There was a lot to do to prepare the rented space for my book launch celebration party and not much time to do it.
Writing is hard. There’s no point softening that sentence with qualifiers. It’s just hard.
James Joyce said, “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.” Elizabeth Gilbert says that 90% of her writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. “I work like a farmer,” she says, “and that’s how it gets done.”
Last night, I got up at 2:30 am to get a drink of water. For some mysterious reason, I suddenly remembered a gift I’d received more than twenty years ago. A work colleague gave my fiance and me an early wedding present; it was a water decanter with matching glasses that had the words ‘his’ and ‘hers’ etched on them. They must have struck us, in our arrogant twenties, as old-fashioned because we made fun of them and gave them away.
I’ve always been ashamed of that.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
👉 Benefit from one-on-one developmental editing sessions