A call for coming home.

A note on coming home to yourself.

When I fall into a running rhythm, the inside chatter gets quieter. Or at least, it seems to fall into a series of organized piles. Like each stride unsticks another thought, tossing it into a place it's better suited to sit.

I wrote this part three times over, trying to capture the exact feeling. I had to call a friend and ask, “is this what it actually feels like?” The truth is: when I write, my fiction writing muscle has a habit of influencing my reality, leaving me wondering if I in fact did feel the way I’m describing (any other Creative Writing majors out there!?). In the journaling classes I teach, I remind writers of how important it is to strengthen the connection between the brain and paper in this practice–to capture unfiltered thoughts. Before they’re edited down into something we like the sound of better. Something a step or two away from the truth.

I feel a sense of control over each step onto the damp Vancouver pavement, paired with every thought. This usually happens after about twenty minutes of steady jogging, thirty minutes of walking, or ten minutes of writing.

It’s a similar feeling of satisfaction to organizing a deck of playing cards after you’ve sprawled them out across the kitchen table on Christmas day. That swish as you pool them together, and then stack them with a satisfying thump on the wooden table. The dust settles.

Once I arrive in that place, I almost always wonder why I don’t take the time to get there more often. Why did I let the hiatus last? I ponder this exact thought as I reach my thirtieth minute of writing this. As I return home to myself.

It feels like the very best part of my favourite song of the night from last Saturday night’s show at The Pearl. And suddenly, I feel so lucky.

Ironically, it’s when life gets noisy that I don’t write or run. It’s then when I fill up my calendar with social commitments and themed pilates classes and forget about that noise in my brain that also needs somewhere to go. A place to be emptied. Some method of organization into heaping piles labeled: professional challenges and concerns, that failed romance, Mom’s chemo, Nanna getting so old that I secretly blink tears into her neck each time that I hug her goodbye.

When I write, run, or even teach a journaling class, the dust settles and the chatter sorts itself out. My world feels like a busy city after a blanket of snow has removed the noise of traffic during winter break. But why does it take so much to get here? Why must I grow homesick for this place to know that I need to visit?

I wonder, for those of you who have a similar relationship to your craft: What is its relationship to the other factors of your life? How often do you return to it?

-S