A Piece of Paper

It has been a long time since I have blogged and I can't tell you how many times I have thought of my next entry beginning with, "I am a lazy blogger..." However, as I thought about it, I realized that the statement is not true. I actually have just been reevaluating my priorities, and this one has been placed right where it needs to be.

A while back, I wrote this post about doing what needs to be done, even when I didn't feel like it. Many times, when the housework was overwhelming to look at, I would escape to the computer. (In fact, while typing this, I realized I was doing that and left to finish the dishes before typing again...)  Usually, at those times, I am tired, so I didn't feel like trying to make sense of my thoughts.  Because of that, I would not blog a whole lot until blogging would become the thing on my to-do list that made me feel most guilty. One night, I realized - "This blog is for me - first and foremost - then for the people reading it." I had been so worried about the people who might want to be catching up on the goings-on here that I began to feel pressured. Nothing closes me up in communication more than that kind of pressure! I was paralyzing myself.

Really my lack of writing has been a return to my purpose - write about what is important to me at any given moment - and a return to my priorities - I have been following through on projects that have needed to be done for years. In the time I have been "gone," I have been more committed to keeping things tidy, cleaned out my kitchen, clothes closets and drawers, and gotten into a more comfortable rhythm in our homeschool. These real daily-living priorities have to come first; writing about all the memories along the way is secondary.

I have also discovered something else about myself...I am a paper kind of girl. In our ever-increasing "paperless" (yeah, right!) society, I actually like putting pen to paper to write out my ideas. (If I had realized that over the last few months, there would be more here. My computer was in need of repair and there was no way I was texting all of my thoughts into my iPod!) I think there are two reasons I like paper. First, when I turn on the computer, it is like sitting in the middle of my house and trying not to notice all the stuff that needs to be done. There are so. many. distractions. "I have to check my email...oh, yeah, did that bill get paid?...Hey, I wonder what (insert blogger here) wrote about today.  Add to this that I always am on the computer in the middle of the house, and there are a million other distractions...background noise, messes I *should* be cleaning, projects I could be working on...It is really hard to focus on making a clear sentence in that environment.

Second, there is something so clean and fresh and personal about writing out thoughts on a blank sheet of paper. It is like the quote from Anne of Green Gables, "Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it."  That is what an empty piece of paper feels like.  There is nothing distracting there. No demands are made on me there. The words flow out in my own handwriting, instead of one of the seven fonts I can choose from here.  (Actually, it is probably good there are only seven...I easily spend hours finding the right font for invitations and such - I even made a spreadsheet that allows me to type a word and see it in 125 different fonts...I still sometimes look for a new one!  How much time would I waste here???)  It is so nice to not have to think about typos or making the writing sound right...I can worry about that when I type it up.  With my tendency to "rabbit trail," it is nice to just be able to flip the page and write a quick thought for later, and not really miss a beat on writing my current thoughts.

There are a lot of things running through my head that I will likely share at some point.  I am not going to worry about when.  I am not going to worry about how long or short of a post I write.  I will write about what I am thinking about and, hopefully, it will be something my friends and family will enjoy reading.  In the meantime, you can rest assured that my ideas will be written out somewhere on a piece of paper way before you see them here, and my kitchen will likely be clean.