How to get to what’s next: Balancing ambition and comfort

I went to prenatal yoga at 11am yesterday. It was a Monday. Perhaps nothing has made me feel more at the top of the human food chain. Who does that? Who gets to change out of their pajamas at 10:30am, drive downtown on a Monday and spend 75 minutes doing yoga?

As it turns out, the answer really shouldn’t have been me. I only went because I can’t make my evening class this week, and at 31 weeks pregnant, I am fearful of what could happen to my poor body if I go a week without making sure it can still bend in half. But though I worked before and after the session, it screwed up my productivity of my entire day to the point that I just gave up around 7pm and decided to start again tomorrow.

But here’s the thing: That was just fine. I wasted a day of my regular productivity, and I was fine. I have a beautiful home, the mortgage for which I can afford, even with an occasional day off; I control my own schedule; I genuinely enjoy what I do, so if I spend 14 hours doing it tomorrow, that’s fine; I absolutely have 14 hours to dedicate to work each day; but I don’t have to. I stop when I want.

Who is this person? When, I began to wonder when assessing all of this, did I become a person surrounded by comfort? And exactly how is it going to destroy me?

Read more

The Residual Benefits of Getting Away

Last week I did something truly delightful: I went on a four-day writing retreat. It sounds so luxurious, doesn’t it? Before you get too carried away imagining a long weekend of spa treatments sandwiched between spurts of blogging, do note that it was definitely a working trip. I worked on my book proposal from the […]

Read more

Well…define “progress”

The Non-Writing Part of Writing Writing publicly that you will stick to something is an excellent way to exercise your making-excuses muscles. Here it is, check-in day, and I have to report my progress on my wedding blog and my book. I was just settling in to think of the least incriminating way to explain […]

Read more