February 7, 2022
All in good time
“I thought you turned your book in?” a friend asked me recently. I guess I’d built up the expectation that after January 10th, my calendar would be cleared.
It was cleared—for four days, at which point I had the report back from my editor and a new deadline for a revised manuscript. The irony of this book project, In Good Time, is how late I seem to be running on the publishing timeline. The book is due out on December 6th.
I laugh, of course—because I know this about the writing process. You have to live the anxieties, the questions if you’re meant to address them.
And what greater anxiety do we have about time than that there won’t be enough?
I do love the current stage of this project, due in another week and a half. As Lauren Winner, a mentor in my MFA program, likes to remind us, revision is re-seeing. For the writer, it’s the occasion of first putting on the reader’s hat. You stand back from what you’ve said. Is it what you meant to say? What have you left out? Overstated? Said badly? What does your editor say about the gaping holes?
One thing that has struck me—and will not strike you with any surprise—is how habit is so central to this project. It’s in the subtitle, of course: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace.
Initially, I worried this subtitle would convey the formulaic advice I was prepared to give. Rise early! Get a paper planner! Practice the Sabbath! I worried readers would be disappointed by my neglect of practicalities. I worried they would discover how much I have in common with one of my sons I’ve come to call, “Mr. Daydream.”
But standing back from the whole of the book, I see how the whole project is a wholesale case for practice, this oft-ignored category of the spiritual life, which we fear affronts grace.
Important books have informed this project, many of them arguing their own case for practice. There is, for example, the Rule of Saint Benedict, which I was reading early in the pandemic and which started to shape in me a vision for daily, weekly, monthly constancy. There is the book on the seven deadly sins, Glittering Vices, which I mentioned only recently to my spiritual director. Her eyebrows shot up: she was a little apprehensive about this book in a reforming Enneagram One. The central point of the book, however, is that vice is matter of habit, and practices will be needed to form virtue.
It’s good to circle back, at the beginning of February (and in these parts, at the beginning of every month) to the value of good habits. Maybe you started 2022 strong and aspiring. And maybe you didn’t. Never mind. The question is: what are you practicing today, and who is that practice training you to become?
Habits are hard, people. THEY ARE HARD FOR ME! Ryan reminded me of this recently when we were talking about some needed new habits in our marriage. We talked about how divided we felt about those habits, wanting them and also resisting them. We didn’t want to conscript our future selves into promises for which we might no longer be in the mood.
Here’s what you do when habits are hard.
· You get as brutally realistic as you can about what you can attempt. Make it small, even ridiculously so. You want to succeed, not fail.
· You tell somebody your intentions. Make it someone who loves you nearly as much as your mom—and someone with eyebrows like my spiritual director.
· You pray, pray, pray. You don’t attempt any change without the desperate prayer of, “God, I don’t even want this, but I have an inkling it would be best. HELP ME.”
· You track your progress and celebrate your successes.
· You problem-solve when first attempts at habit-formation don’t work. Maybe you were too ambitious. Maybe you were too hazy on the what and the how and the why. Maybe you got COVID, and there wasn’t much more to do with the day than survive it.
· You try again.
“There is no quick and easy substitute for daily repetition over the long haul,” writes Rebecca DeYoung in Glittering Vices.
Stick with it, my friends. All in good time.
Jen