Author: Angela Rydell

When I began meditating years ago, I practically rolled my eyes at the first instruction, “Stay with your breath.” I was in a musty living room on Madison’s near west side, and could’ve stayed home to feel air entering my nostrils.

I’m not sure what I’d expected. Grander instruction, air less musty, so I could experience a requisite buzz or hum that beckoned me closer to enlightenment, reassuring me of the peace that awaited me in due time? Instead, I felt embarrassment. I couldn’t stay with my breath more than a second or two.

That was the first of many lessons I received, a lesson less about breath watching than being okay with things as they are–including embarrassment. Eventually I realized that if I can actually attain “being okay with embarrassment,” I’m actually doing pretty darn well. Yay?

When we enter into something new—whether meditation, writing, or video editing for our account on Twitter—it’s common to look ahead to the grand end result we desire, idealize it, and overlook all the steps and stumbles in between. Our minds fast-forward to nirvana levels of happiness, Academy Award winning cinematography, or the legendary stream-of-consciousness purity of On the Road.

Okay, most of us know there will be additional steps between now and enlightened mastery. But those finish lines we strive for? That end product seems so effortless. How hard could it be to get there?

Turns out, it’s pretty hard—or we perceive it to be—because there’s a gap between where we are now, and where we want to be. The hardest part, for most of us, is bridging that gap—and that means repeated effort. Practicing. And practicing without the thrum of enlightenment coursing through our veins every second. It even means realizing, on days we have a few blissful achievements, that the bridge may not be taking us where we expect. It may be hard to know where the “there” we’re supposed to get to is, exactly.

We may experience this as a crisis of faith. Especially because, by then, the thing we were excited about when we started isn’t new anymore. It’s gotten kind of old.

But that’s just another stumble on the path. And there’s way out of that crisis of faith.

Look not to the finish line, but the small steps you’re taking in your practice. Now look closer. Is the process really getting old?

Actually, if you attend carefully as you enter whatever inlet helps you connect to your work, you will find a new eddy, discover a different pull in the current, each time. Like the current in a stream you can never step into twice. But it helps to keep the flow going.

Whether we’re writers returning to a draft, starting a revision, beginning a new piece because we’re tossing yesterday’s attempt, or tweaking that attempt to make it better today, good rewriting isn’t rehashing. It’s just another beginning.

Today I posted a quote from the prolific writer James Michener on Facebook that says as much: “Real writing begins with rewriting.” There it begins.

In mindfulness meditation, the goal isn’t to feel the thrum of peace while counting blissful breaths, but to be present when peace isn’t present. Or heck, maybe it is. Until it isn’t. And be with what happens after you’ve been distracted—yanked into resentment or sleepiness or grocery lists—then yanked back to reconnect. Right now.

It requires faith in the process and yourself. And as you ring in the new this year, and write in the New Year, trust you can find the old in the new, the new in the old—returning, recovering, letting go of old patterns that are no longer useful, or being with them in a new way.

And with each rewriting, begin again.

Every year I evoke the kindly spirt of Dickens’ work around the holidays. What he called the ghost of his ideas continues to inhabit this readers’ thoughts, and, as he had hoped, haunt my house pleasantly. Whether I pick up A Christmas Carol or David Copperfield, his work invites good cheer and goodwill, but also rattles the shackles of greed and chains of ill-will I fear squeeze at my own heart on occasion–ghosts of scroogeries past, awakened by reading his work.

This year, I’m haunted by a shopping excursion from a couple years back, when I grabbed the last of an item on the shelf—an art stamp on my list I’d been searching out for a holiday craft project. And there it was! Just the right flourish. I felt deeply satisfied, and mentally checked off a box, when a woman who was scrutinizing the shelves alongside me sighed. She’d been looking for just that stamp, she said, eyeing it in my hand. For years.

My hand closed over it more tightly.

Truth is, I’ve hardly used it since. It sat in a box of holiday décor this year, unused. I didn’t really need it. In fact, what I took home that day has become more of a burden than a blessing, a ghost of a Christmas past that haunts me with “if onlys” when I run my thumb over the contours of its translucent rubber exterior.

If only I could go back into the past and tell my consumer-minded self that I’d feel more satisfied by opening my hand, rather than closing it. If only I could find that disappointed woman now, and bring the coveted stamp to her doorstep, tied up in a bow.

But we can’t un-scrooge our pasts. We can only unscrooge our presents and our futures.

Dickens’ ghosts of ideas, his call to goodwill, and the underlying themes within the covers of his books, never quite leave us. I love how stories can use acts of selfishness to remind us we’re not alone in our flaws, poverty to remind us of our riches, or ghosts to remind us that we’re mortal—and redeemable.

Even the scroogiest of us, and the scroogiest moments of our lives, can do what Dickens intended through storytelling: “awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts.”

Same for all books we take in and take to heart. As readers, what we read becomes part of our thinking, being, understanding—and our continued growth. All the books of my reading’s past harken to the present and future, and continue to guide and, yes, haunt me, nudging me to face the unpleasant and even harsh truths of experience, through another’s experiences—craft transforming experience into art, and art transforming knowledge into behavior.

May you, too, endeavor to raise ghosts of ideas that will haunt your readers pleasantly and, as Dickens says, “not put [your] readers out of humor with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with [you].”

Sometimes the blank page feels like a bright black hole—strange, otherworldly, and indecipherably alien. And when that chasm stares back at you, you might fear that anything going in there will go nowhere. But if you’re a scientist, you don’t fear black holes as much as revere them.

Scientists keep looking into strange anomalies until they’re anomalies with form and shape—decipherable bodies that soon may lose anomaly status altogether. Even black holes exhibit patterns when examined close enough.

Black holes spin—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. They can even appear hairy, or bald as a billiard ball. Some emit powerful jets of gas that rip off nearby red giants’ outer layers and demote them to dwarf status.

In other words, black holes are amazing wonders of the universe. They’re powerful. So is the blank page.

Let it teach you its shape and form. Let its dark mysteries reveal themselves to you.

The next time you fear the blank page, or find that the chasm of an unruly draft feels bottomless, don’t shy away. Become an obsessed scientist. Let that strangeness be a beacon, luring you in.

Observe what you see. Even how you see.

What if the very thing you’re afraid of can become your salvation.

I remember learning of S.A.D. years back, and thinking, huh, seasonal affectiveness is a disorder? Not something we all feel and experience? Not everyone takes the encroaching darkness personally? Of course not.

But I’ve come to realize that while I’m one of the unlucky ones, so impacted by a change in light that my mood changes, accordingly—dictated by the sun’s lead (though I blame Daylight Savings time for the worst of it)—I kind of like it. Well, in the right proportions, at least.

Darkness makes me despondent on the worst days, but on the best days, I’ve found I can harness the darkness. Use it. Embrace that inward turn and even seek out the insight it brings. I can be in the dark, and stare. And look even closer. And see what’s there.

That’s often where my best writing comes from—when I not only face darkness, but identify its shape, and form. Name it. Feel its inky sink, its irksome weight. And listen to the stories that spin and pull me down into it. When I write through that experience, I can (usually!) find a light to guide me.

In fact, part of what I enjoy about the winter is searching for the light—internal and external light. Just like a good plot, the search is often as important as the find itself.

So I continue the search, a kind of treasure hunt each day and night. This year, since I can’t be bedazzled by literal treasures in Christmas shop displays and glitzy holiday sales (those usually help me, I admit—I’m a sucker for holiday decor) I’ve been countering the dark and cold by spending more time in it outside—and staying aware. Looking for a different kind of treasure. I’m a sucker for natural surprises, too.

On neighborhood walks in twilight, my husband and I seek out the soft hooting of two great horned owls that keep returning to our block, and thrill when, in slow swoop, their massive wingspans open then close over dim silhouettes of hickories and pines. The other day they disappeared into the thin copse behind our neighbor’s house and left me starting at the brushstrokes of bare branches, pondering the trees’ patient hunker as the darkness bore down. A darkness soon softened by the owl’s returning calls.

 As it gets colder, we in the Northern climes hunker down inside, where our heaters kick in as the temperature gets intolerably low. Heat sensors do all the hard work for us—we don’t even need to flip a switch. Automatic warmth floods our homes.

Before electric or gas heaters, folks relied on a lot of wool, fireplaces, and good will. As the days get darker and mornings chillier, I often think of the father in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” who got up early in the blueblack cold:

then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.

Writers too can make banked fires blaze–on the page, despite cracked hands that ache from other labors.

Sometimes it’s easier than other times—and yes, some folks have it easier than you. Some harder. That may change next week. Next month. Next year.

No matter. The work is the same.

And the principle is the same. You know what it’s like to take off a mitten and wiggle those stiff fingers? They’re so cold they can barely move. But by moving, they come back to life again.

Remember that feeling.

Your writing practice can start feeling like that numb hand in a mitten if you don’t put in enough effort. Sometimes that happens even when you do!

So what are you doing to keep your writing practice warm enough to work right? Do you have a system so powerful that it keeps you going no matter what?

Think of the creative ways we stay warm in the winter: Hot water bottles. Soup mugs as hand-warmers. Door snakes. Then there’s the Löwchen—AKA “Little Lion Dog”—trimmed to be used as a foot warmer for elite ladies back in the 16^th century. Though a lazy hound snoozing at the other end of the couch will do, too.

Make a list if your “heat sources”: An online class, a collection of craft books and a reading schedule, a reading list you work through each month, a book group, a critique group, a mentorship program, a few lit journal subscriptions, writing newsletter subscriptions, writing forums. Online readings for the month by writers you love.

Then follow through to stave off the cold. What are you going to do to keep your writing practice cozy and blazing, so it never loses its vibrancy? Or if you can’t get that front burner to blaze, maybe just keep a back burner on the barest of blue. That might be enough to get you through.