“Do you want to stay on the path you are on, or do you want to make some changes to work toward the life you want?”
That’s the question Tonya Dalton asks near the end of her new self-help book, The Joy of Missing Out. It’s a book that I had been eyeing for a while, because what I could glean of its message from the description seemed to resonate well with my own interest in “reclaiming our time,” which I’ve touched upon occasionally in these newsletters.
It turns out, as I discovered just after Christmas, to be a very on-point book about establishing your priorities, then rearranging your life around them. Because, as Taylor writes, “we don’t just find ourselves on a fulfilling, deeply satisfying path—we create it for ourselves.”
New Year’s Day feels like a good day to talk about establishing priorities. After all, many of us have probably made resolutions for the year ahead, things we want to accomplish, metaphorical trophies we can hang on our metaphorical walls—losing X number of pounds, or producing a finished manuscript, maybe even getting an agent.
But are we really prepared to treat such goals as priorities? Or will we just try to squeeze them into our schedules around everything else we’ve already got going on?
In order to write a book, you need to become a person who is capable of writing a book. I believe just about everyone has that potential, but many of us choose not to cultivate that potential, because we believe that there are other things we need to do with our life first, and we spend so much time and energy on those things that we don’t have anything left for writing. We might still dream of writing, though; we might even be willing to give it a shot—if only we could figure out when we’d be able to do it.
I wrote this a little over a year ago, and it still rings true, at least to me:
“Am I saying you should quit your job and devote yourself to writing full-time? Well, I’m not saying not to do that, but I have to admit it’s not a very practical decision, unless you’ve got some kind of support structure lined up.
But you can start reclaiming your time, minute by minute. Start with the distractions outside the office: How much television do you really need to watch? Are you reading for edification, or escape? How many people do you really need to follow on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram?”
If you treat writing like it’s just another thing you can do with your free time, I can almost guarantee that you will, at some point, put your writing practice down in favor of something that’s a lot easier, that doesn’t require such intense focus and concentration. You need to make a sincere commitment, and that means you need to commit to showing up for your writing practice, the same way you commit to showing up for your job or your family.
And, though I can’t tell anybody else how to apportion their commitments to work, family, and writing, I can tell you that if you don’t make a conscious decision to set those proportions yourself, work and family will inevitably make the choice for you.
So don’t tell yourself you’re going to write a book this year. Instead, promise yourself you’re going to make time to hone your writing practice. It might lead to a book this year; it might not. What it will most likely do, if you stick with it, is strengthen your resolve to write, and enable you to further refine your priorities until you’re able to create a life that’s more personally fulfilling because you’ve given yourself a space to fulfill your most authentic desires and interests.