Today I am Writing: On Productivity

Every year when May hits, I think: Hooray for May! 

I think: Now I can be productive! Because the campus is cleared and the emails slow down and the sun is shining and the birds continually sing, I envision myself writing heartily away, every single day.

I get out all my writing gear, sit myself down, and: Slump.

Cannot. come up with. a thing. to. say.

This year I think: Give yourself some time.

So I clean up the yard. I wash the windows. I reorganize the spaces and switch out the summer clothes and pile the things to give away. I invite people into my house again, feed them, listen behind their words for what their hearts want most.

I breathe. I listen. I recover all of the space I had given away.

It takes longer than I think, but suddenly I begin to notice:

Questions regarding how to proceed in a new year at the Institute simmer to the surface, in parts of my thinking that got unavailable in the whirlwind of a flying fast semester. I write them down, I chew on them in the back of my brain. Then, suddenly, without the slightest plan of it, I discover I am having a visioning meeting as I'm knee-deep in the closet. Ideas come left and right, bantering away.

The book I'm writing except-for-the-wall-I-have-hit begins to float into parcels of "go here" and "let that go." Elbow-high in soapy water, gates of my thinking open to reveal what people need, what I need, what someone else has already done and what is waiting yet to be.

It turns out that being productive with my hands makes space for my heart and my mind to join in.

I think of something I read the other day, that "the practice of paying attention really does take time*."

And I realize that in order to be truly Productive, one must first allow the time to find the space in which there is the simple capacity to simply pay attention.

*An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor, p. 24