A Box of Good Intentions
Or How I Learned...Will Learn...To Stop Worrying And Love The Things Not Done
Sitting on a flat rock on Knuckles Creek.
When I put this together, I thought that it would be easy to take 30 or 45 minutes per week to write about whatever the hell I wanted to. It hasn’t been.
I read and write at the behest of employers and professors for roughly 85 hours per week. Even taking the few minutes to suss this out is coming at the expense of cite-checking references for a Journal article. It’s fine, though. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being unprolific when operating under your own agency.
So I’ll write when I write and I won’t when I don’t and I’ll try to be okay with that.
***
A couple of weekends ago I met a friend for a weekend in the Ozarks. We sat by the fire and connected in a really wonderful way. During the day, we took a 9-mile hike down to the confluence of the Buffalo Creek (which eventually becomes the Buffalo River, a legendary Arkansas waterway) and Knuckles Creek. We found a spot in the sun where we could eat lunch on this flat rock with our feet in the water. It was very peaceful, very tiring, and could not have been a more necessary break in the interminable and identical weeks that make up the semester.
One thing that I love about deciduous forests is that they all smell familiar. The ridges and undergrowth and creeks and rocks and moss and critters are all unique, but they are all related, and I feel like I recognize them in a certain kind of way.
A Box of Good Intentions
Enjoyed this. As an academic myself I can sympathise with the challenge of meeting competing (and sometimes unrealistic) deadlines. Writing on your own terms is a wonderful way to preserve ones sanity and drive for other projects.
Also...loved your reference to how deciduous forests have more than a tinge of familiarity to them - there is an honest and comforting unity throughout nature's ecosystem.
Well said! It’s the difficulty about writing—to always maintain some connection with the part of it that comes from joy and wonder rather than discipline.