Changes and Choosing to Write

I have really been in the blahs the past several weeks. Perhaps it is this in-between time of transition before our big move—all the sorting, purging, selling, planning, with as of yet none of the results. Our apartment has become a cluttered purgatory of sorts, with our hearts no longer in its keeping. I’m not cleaning with as much gusto, knowing we’ll have to do the whole move-out deep-clean anyway, and as we’ve sold and donated the larger items that used to fill our space, our rooms feel ill-suited to us. In our living room, where once dwelt a couch for which I lacked any fondness, are a few scattered throw pillows. We’ve rid our space of a few tables and some bookshelves, along with all sorts of books we knew we’d never read again that were just using space. In our kitchen are the last remnants of the summer’s CSA share—a pile of acorn squash, some potatoes, four pumpkins, and a butternut, most of which we’ll need to process and freeze before we move this coming weekend.

I can understand some cause of blahs from this transition; transitions are always weird, and not quite as tidy around the edges as you imagine them to be when you first make a shiny new plan to change course. But really, that’s not all this is.

Part of it is this: I haven’t been writing. I’ve gotten sucked into the daily grind and haven’t made it a priority to rise before the sun and hustle. To spend this “me” time airing and progressively-processing the thoughts that remain in me without outlet unless I put them to words.

Here’s another confession: I get depressed sometimes. It’s one of those struggles I have now and then—and really for me it boils down to a choice. I can choose to meditate on God’s goodness and His purpose for my life in all the good and the bad, or I can get depressed and dwell on the little things that go wrong or hurt me or don’t go how I planned, and let them control my outlook. When choosing the latter, it starts a self-feeding blah cycle in which I stop doing things that would otherwise keep me positive—like writing.

But I’m on the upswing.



I’m in my favorite time of year after all, the autumn.

I’m about to make a change of lifestyle that is truer to my resourceful, thrifty values: living well below my means.

I’m making the choice, as I know I will have to again when I’ve allowed the blahs to take over for a while, to write.

And, my heart is being nourished by one of my favorite books of all time: Of Whom The World Was NotWorthy. I’ll tell you about it later, because it will really tie in with the other major thing on my mind right now. But I’ll explain that later. Sorry to dangle withheld information from you, but if Dickens taught me anything about writing, it’s that the cliffhanger (a thing which he popularized and named, if not invented) is a genius literary device that keeps you coming back. So come on back, folks.