Deliberate living and a career pivot.
I'm listening to a podcast, but all I can think of are Henry David Thoreau's words from Walden, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." Dead Poet's Society is on Hulu right now, so that might have something to do with it.
It's mid-morning and I'm walking in the woods. Ava's trotting next to me, blending in almost perfectly with the layer of fallen leaves on the ground. She's a four(ish)-year-old rescue with a lot of curiosity and a healthy dose of separation anxiety. But she loves people; and for that I feel very lucky.
While we walk, she keeps wandering off the path to explore those good, wooded smells wafting through the breeze.
Yes, I'm in Vermont... but this is a morning dog walk, not some grand exodus. And yet, it speaks to something I'm grappling with a bit lately. In my earbud, John Grisham is talking about going from being a lawyer to becoming a writer. Host Adam Grant digs at exactly what I want to know more about: the change itself rather than what caused it. But to get there, John said we'd need the backstory.
Right after getting out of law school, he'd been assigned to a murder trial in Mississippi where he was to defend the accused. He hadn't known what he was doing and the judge could tell. So he let John excuse himself to throw up in the restroom before closing arguments began. Turns out, John hadn't prepared one and would end up improvising anyway. His dream of becoming a lawyer didn't quite pan out—even though he won that case—so he decided to give writing a shot.
That's when he started going to the office every day at 5am, three hours before he had to work, to squeeze in some writing time.
As Ava and I rounded the last corner of the trail, making our way home, I paused the podcast to focus on my thoughts for a second. John said he began writing his first novel A Time To Kill because he knew courtroom drama; what's my version of "writing what I know?"
Back inside, staring at my laptop, I'm thinking about John's pivot away from law. I'm wondering if turning in his first book felt like throwing up before that closing argument, because I don't really know what I'm doing, either.
Still, I'm ready.
"...to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Carpe Diem.
Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
57/365
What's your version of "write what you know"?
onward.
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