An Old Master

I had a nasty cold this week, the first time in about five years. It was like an old an unpleasant relative came to visit, whose company I used to endure more frequently because that’s what you do. People get sick. Until, that is, one flu season after another rolled by uneventfully, and I decided that getting sick was no longer what I did. Things change – sometimes, maybe often, for the better. However, I’d been feeling a little overwhelmed lately, what with all the clients and podcasts and classes and travel. I liked it all, no one had forced any of it on me, but there were no empty spaces on my calendar, and I began to see my days as filled with things and then more things I had to do.

The nice part about being sick is you can’t really do anything. Though I tried. Even as I felt it coming on, I coached one client and had a nice music lesson, but then that night I hardly slept. I quarantined myself in my office for my wife’s sake, and there I coughed and tossed and blew my nose. I’d forgotten how the head itself feels congested right up into the brain, how my mind latches onto a single thought – in this case, a chord change my teacher had suggested for a song I’d written – and goes over it and over it and over it. No empty space, no stillness between the ears into which I could slip to find my needed rest.

I did not so much wake up as abandon my bed the next morning. I cancelled a doctor’s appointment I had told myself the day before I’d try to make, showered, ate, and sat on my couch, exhausted and ill. My cat Birdie joined me on my lap. A cat’s life for me, I thought. Sometimes I’d envy them as I went off to school as a kid. Birdie purred as I scratched her chin, and I thought, “Don’t do anything today, not one thing, until you feel like doing it.” I hardly finished that thought before I fell asleep.

By day’s end I could feel the cold relenting, and I awoke the next morning with a clear and curious mind. I could write a memoir called, I Didn’t Want To, But I Did It Anyway. I’ve felt sometimes as if I’d lived my whole life waiting for the time to come when my days would be mine and mine alone. I’m not sure who I thought it belonged to, but if they’re like me and I met them, they’d likely say, “I don’t need yours. I’ve already got one of my own.” It’s true, though how easy it is to serve some old master we invented when we felt unmotivated, handing him the whip and saying, “Better use it, or I’ll just sit here on the couch until I’m interested in life again.”

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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