15 Minutes Till Chips

I used to write every day in a spiral bound notebook. I used to write 3 longhand, single-spaced pages every morning, before I did anything else. I started doing this when I started reading “The Artist’s Way,” a book Sarah’s mum loaned or gave her when we were young and living in a basement suite, between shit jobs and growing fungus in our bathtub. One of the first things the Artist’s Way tells you to do is to do these “morning pages” because the act of centering your mind in this way, by freeing it to spill out on the page without the influence of the powerful inner critic erasing every second word you write, is a valuable step towards allowing yourself to create all and how you want to create.

I have always been someone who writes in a journal. Since I was 6, I think? I have an old, pink diary with a lock that I pick with a ballpoint pen because I lost the key long ago. Early entries were brief and sporadic but when I got older, I wrote more and in more detail. I took the time, sometimes, to craft journal entries that I would have been pleased to see published after my death. But nothing compared to the magic of morning pages.

Before – or while – drinking the first cup of coffee of the day, my mind was still dreaming, still finishing the conversation with the mystery minotaur about the price of pork bellies. And when I wrote it down, as fast as I could, without thinking about it or reading back over the sentence I’d just scribbled, everything sorted out and I was able to come to consciousness gracefully. I found that at the halfway mark, at 15 minutes or 1.5 pages, my mind would take a turn from the mundane – or surreal – into my actual subconscious and I would often have my awareness shifted, I would realize suddenly the answer to what might have been puzzling me for days or weeks. Every few months I’d go back and read old morning pages and would be stunned to see that I had had the same realizations many times over; but confined to the quiet, private space of morning, I had not felt the need to act on those realizations or bring them into the world any further than that notebook, that day. Each realization was a step or a building block towards a greater idea or epiphany or the ability to stand up and say, “enough, I have been thinking enough; it is time to act.”

I have not done morning pages in more than a year. I think the habit fell down when I was pregnant with Trombone; I simply needed that half hour of sleep more than just about anything. Then, with the baby in the house, there was nothing predictable about my days and I certainly couldn’t count on a morning routine that could be augmented with 30 minutes of writing time. No matter how good it is for me, no matter how good it feels, it just wasn’t getting done.

Now, of course, I am getting up at 5:30 every day. 5:30 – 6 am is my waking up time and I have been using it to drink tea, read email and blogs, after rolling out of bed usually 5 minutes after the alarm. But this week I have re-introduced morning pages – not half an hour because I can’t spare that time yet, but 15 minutes per morning. Free-form scribble and babble in a spiral notebook I bought years ago that is not even close to half-full.

15 minutes at a time I will build these muscles back.