Baby Steps Still Propel You Forward

I can be an impatient person. I see an end goal, a final project, and all I want is to have it DONE. Although I have the ability to also foresee the many, many steps involved in getting to the end of something, it is often hard for me to calmly take each step, knowing that eventually what I want will materialize before me, not with a *POOF* as if out of nowhere, but instead out of the many small steps I have taken in the right direction.

This has been especially hard for me lately. I am planning a move, and the move requires many small steps that will eventually leave me in the new place where I desire to be. In turn, moving will give me some time and space to focus, which will then lead to more time to write, something I want so badly it leaves a lump in my throat.

I have been craving time to write for years. This craving is what led me to quit my job in Bellevue – it led me to make a decision to divert part of each paycheck into a savings account that I never touched; to stay at the job in Bellevue for a year, wanting to tear my hair out, as my baby steps eventually led to the day that I turned in my resignation and walked out with the money to start again.

I learned about publishing in baby steps: how the industry worked, the advantages of self-publishing, the slowly changing behemoth of traditional publishing, and the joy of learning of other like-minded individuals who want to breathe life into their words and share that life with others.

I wrote my cookbooks in baby steps. Talk to wineries and restaurants; create recipe templates, call, email and cajole contributors, make appointments to take pictures, test recipes one at a time, lay out pages, edit, edit, EDIT, print, sell, one Facebook post, one local retailer, one Amazon sale, one new friend at a time.

I have grown confident of my writing in baby steps. Regardless of how long I have called myself a writer, it has only been recently that I have started sending out essays to publications, no longer afraid of their rejection. Suddenly I realize that I have something important to say and all I need is to find the right place to say it. This is not to say that I will not continue to improve, but only through writing for the past four years have I finally gotten to the point where I can realize that I am actually a writer in a way that feels real and visceral.

I have found my way here through baby steps. I feel a book trying to emerge, and I want it to come out in one fell swoop, leaping out of my brow much like Athena leaped, fully formed and ready to fight, out of Zeus’ forehead. The task seems overwhelming. It seems like I will never finish, because it is so hard to start; because the baby steps seem so infinitely small.

More than a year ago, two writing friends and I decided to do the Artist’s Way. It is a 12-week program to help people rediscover their creativity, in whatever way, shape and form it may take. One of the essential parts of the course is the morning pages: first thing in the morning, you take a pen and a notebook and write. At first, I got up an hour early to do this. At first, I wrote the three pages suggested, but then I realized that I was taking on more than I could handle. I cut it down to a page, got up a half hour early, and found it was the most joyful part of my day. Fifteen months later, I look forward to waking up, making coffee and settling in with a cup in one hand and a pen in the other, a notebook resting on my lap. More often than not, I fill two or three pages before I realize what I’ve done. I have filled more than 500 pages – front and back – with my scrawling handwriting. 

I am impatient, and yet the mountains I have moved the farthest are the ones that I pushed a little at a time. Although the ones ahead seem daunting, all I have to do is look behind me to see how far I’ve already come, one baby step at a time.

Love and baby step kisses

Morgan

Moving advice? Stop storing your memories in boxes.

I am an expert mover. I have not lived longer than a year in any single house since I went to college, including IN college. If there were anyone who could give you tips on moving, it would be me. After moving yesterday for the umpteenth time in my life, the only advice I want to give you is that memories store a lot more easily – and cheaply – in your head.
I didn’t always feel this way. I love to travel, and I used to gather things when I traveled that would remind me of where I’d been. I used to get a kick out of imagining all my worldly possessions in a new place: they were from all over the world, and now here they were, with me, in a new city, state or apartment.
This move was a little different for me. It’s the first lease I’ve signed since I left Bellevue and my job there two and a half years ago, and it’s also the first time I will be utilizing most of my furniture and other possessions that have very neatly organized (and repeatedly reorganized) in my storage unit until yesterday. (Another moving tip? Get boxes with lids or that at least close, and LABEL THEM.) Since Bellevue, I’ve been living in other peoples’ houses and using their furniture and utensils while using the bare minimum of my own stuff: not everyone has a box labeled “Kitchen Bare Essentials,” but I do.
It doesn’t help that I haven’t been feeling well, but the truth of the matter is that when I started opening up all my boxes and going through them, I was amazed at the stuff I’ve been spending good money storing.
I love to cook, but even I do not need 10 mixing bowls. My parents claimed nostalgia over my first pair of skis (Dad) and the first baby dishes (Mom) but didn’t want to haul them around themselves, so they gave them to me. Same goes for some very beautiful but unwieldy painted platters from Mexico that they didn’t want. Come to think of it, that’s why I have a fern the size of a trash can, too.
I can’t blame all of it (or even most of it) on my parents, though. Despite the fact that I purge with every move, I am apparently part pack rat. In the back and bottom of my storage unit is a monstrous trunk, about 100 pounds with no handles, chock FULL of high school memorabilia. I NEVER look in it. The last time I cracked the lid, I threw out a bunch of stuff, wondering why exactly I had kept it. I think I have the idea -- like most people -- that eventually someone else will be interested in the things I have hoarded my whole life, but the truth of the matter is that no one else knows their significance but me. For example, I have been holding onto a really nice expensive coffee maker given to me by an ex-boyfriend, who sadly never understood why I was attached to making coffee with my Melita. Surely I’m not nostalgically holding onto a coffeemaker…am I? Who else but me would even know where it came from, and why I'm packing it around if I never use it?
Don’t get me wrong: I am just as nostalgic as the next person. What I’m realizing, however, after two plus years of living without my prized possessions, is that perhaps they aren’t so prized and necessary after all. Seeing them does not evoke anymore nostalgia than thinking about them did, and I don’t have to pay to store the memories. The only thing that I’m really glad I kept are my old journals, and those are much smaller and easier to carry. They also pack a lot more memories per square inch than the monstrous Mexican rug I have no room for.
Obviously at some point in my life I thought it was worth packing these things into boxes to keep them from breaking and holding onto them until I had a place to put them again. Now that I have a place, however, I’m wondering what exactly that supposed worth was.

Love and moving kisses,
Morgan