A friend said yesterday that she admired my discipline in writing every day. It's true that I have written a blog every day except Sunday since 14 November - my birthday - and posted it at michaelmullins.org and sent it as a TinyLetter email.
If I decide to do something, I do it. If I can. There will be times when I can't. Like in the coming days when I travel to Tasmania from Saturday until next Thursday to walk the Three Capes Track with members of my family and their friends. I will be out of my routine, dancing to a different, more communal, tune that probably won't include the space and the technology that makes daily writing as easy as sleeping and eating.
I woke up this morning with a slight headache. I thought about not writing, in the way that you think about not eating when you're not feeling well. But I opened my computer and started to write. I just did it.
I keep reassuring myself that I am not creating expectations of the quality of my daily writing. It is about what is on my mind, the stream of my consciousness. Regularity rather than the literary or intellectual merit.
Writing in this way is a centering and mind clearing exercise that takes its cue from the Morning Pages exercise that I was introduced to this year at a personal development workshop.
The person who created the Morning Pages prescribed three pages in longhand, and it wasn't designed as a piece of writing to be shared. Those aspects of the exercise are not relevant to me in the way that writing to start to day is.
It's a practice that I am making my own, to still the mind and collect and organise thoughts and present them as an offering to family and friends and anybody else who is interested, in the manner and form of a traditional blog.