A) The day after I left my newsroom job, I wrote in my journal that I now wanted to develop neater handwriting. The cause-effect relationship between leaving the newsroom and suddenly producing neat handwriting was so direct a line in my mind then that I didn’t feel the need to explain it. I have been thinking about this entry since I wrote it, more than three semesters ago. (There has been very little change in my handwriting.)
Writing a word neatly by hand, by writing one letter, then stopping, then writing the next letter, didn't seem like a goal I could pursue in a newsroom. It felt luxurious to slow down in that way. It required the ability to pause momentum in order to consider each separate act.
B) As a kid, I’d frequent neighborhood swimming pools in the summertime with friends, and I have been thinking this year of the advice given by a mom to a son, who felt apprehension at jumping off a diving board into the deep end of a pool: climb up to the diving board, stand on the edge and look down at the water. Don’t jump until that view is familiar enough to you to be comfortable. Create a pause in momentum.
For me, 2022 was this kind of pause. 2022 consisted of me reading and re-reading sentences as a way to revisit building blocks, focusing more on them than the books they live inside. 2022 has been a year in which it’s taken me days, sometimes weeks, to write down one complete thought.
I know now that it is not luxurious, but it is, at best, the surveying of some apprehension, the seconds before a dive.