Everything just right

Cinderella didn’t have fancy tastes. She would have been more than happy to go to the ball in the dress that the critters helped her to make. (Nasjonalbiblioteket)

Five years ago, I took a trip to a resort on the Andaman Sea, in the south of Thailand.

My intention was never to have a beach vacation. I have very pale skin and burn easily. Instead, I planned to spend my time writing a book.

Once I got there, I realized that I may as well have been at a Motel Six five miles from my home — I was just sitting at a desk, typing. But there was a benefit to fact that my time zone had shifted by eleven hours and everyone I knew was asleep.

And there was a benefit to my sense of intention: If I was going to come all this way to write, I better write.

And so I did. I wrote thousands and thousands of words that week. I never finished a book, but I wrote a lot of pieces that eventually became early posts on this blog. It was a relief to get things out of my head and into the world. I built a lot of momentum. Being in a beautiful place didn’t hurt.

In order to stimulate my writing mechanism — the equivalent of what my dad calls “tickling” the raisins to get them out of the box — I focused on words per hour. I typed continuously, without editing. It became a game to see what I could produce, helped along by a clever app called Write or Die. I went for quantity over quality.

These days, though, I don’t need to set aside an entire week at a resort in order to write (although that sounds pretty nice). I have grown accustomed to writing wherever, whenever. Once again in Thailand, I’m writing this in a quiet corner of an empty cafe in Chiang Mai International Airport, undisturbed as announcements blare intermittently in both English and Thai.

Writing still takes effort, but I don’t have to do the trick of typing continuously to get the words to tumble out. I don’t require comfort, peace, or beauty. I just write until it’s done.

It’s hard to say exactly when the writing process started to get easier, but it’s obvious to me now, comparing my current experience in Thailand to my previous one, that it did happen somewhere along the way.

That makes me think about what I do that still does require everything to be “just right” in order for me to follow through on it. Making videos, for one thing. And, like a lot of creative people, there’s that course that I’ve been planning for years...and that book that I’ve been thinking about writing for a decade.

While I could schedule a beach vacation in order to get a head start on one of these projects, I must grudgingly acknowledge that my lesson of the past few years of writing still applies. If I want to follow through and make a given dream a reality, I simply have to make it a priority. I must set aside the time to do it, and then do it, no matter the circumstances.

I’m not suggesting to you that there is no excuse for not doing a project you’ve been wanting to do. Everyone has a different situation. Nor am I intending to imply that there is any shame in deferring or declining projects.

And it’s okay if we do need certain things to be in place in order to take action. I struggle to function on a poor night’s sleep, and I can barely write a word if I’m hungry.

No, I’m just presenting my situation as the manifestation of one possibility that you might consider: What if you didn’t have to wait until the situation were perfect before starting something? What if things didn’t have to be just right? What if they could be a little messy and awkward? Would you be excited to start today? What if you were to do so?

I still have a fantasy of having a peaceful retreat in order to develop and launch a new business or creative project, but all of the evidence suggests that my results depend much less on my circumstances and much more on my intention. If I set out to do it, I probably will, whether everything is just right or not.

I just have to pick a thing to do next. What about you?