During the month of November I signed up for the Write a Novel in a month. Yes, you have 30 days to write 50,000 words. I realize that I was gone for the first 2 weeks of the month and then dove back into the working world for four days a week, leaving me only a few days to try to crank out a mass amount of words (and there's no point just repeating the same word over and over again to help accumulate words).
Along the way the kind people at
NaMo send out helpful, uplifting words to encourage you to keep typing. The last wrap up was just sent out and I thought I'd share it with you all as it seems very
relevant, as most of us get caught up in doing errand after errand and forget about the project we once wanted to accomplish.
"Okay. Jobs. Having a job is one of the greatest, trickiest things you can do as an adult. Employment brings perks like challenges and growth and (sometimes) money. But the longer you work at a job, the easier it is to confuse what you are doing with what you can do.
This is true whether you're a dental hygienist, a stay-at-home parent, or Sirkka-Liisa Anttila, the Forestry Minister of Finland. Because careers tend to be all about specialization. Human beings, on the other hand, contain multitudes. Each of us has a wealth of talents spread broadly over domains both marketable and deliciously impractical. The tricky part is that we tend to develop the former at the expense of the latter. Passions become hobbies. Hobbies become something we swear we'll get back to when we have more time. Or when the kids are grown. Or when the stock market recovers.
Which means we leave unexplored many of those paths that ultimately make us feel most alive—the moments of creating, building, playing, and doing that lead to extraordinary and unexpected things.
Like writing a book.
Or, more loosely, postponing the must-dos of the real world to spend 30 days exploring an attractive, improbable dream.
Giving ourselves that time is so important. Because the world can wait. It's what the world does best, in fact. It was hanging out for 4.5 billion years before we arrived, and it'll be waiting around for another few billion after we're gone.
Our dreams, however, have much shorter shelf-lives.
If there's one thing I've learned from running NaNoWriMo, it's this: Whatever you think you are, you are more than that. You possess a fearsome array of skills and abilities, and the most satisfying of these may be completely unknown to you now. Your curiosity is a dependable guide; follow it. Put yourself in unfamiliar places. Kindle passions. Savor the raw joy of making things, and then remake the best of those things until they take someone's breath away. Wrestle bears.
Actually, skip the bear-wrestling.
But do keep trying big things, okay? Sometimes we can wait so long for a clear sign that it's time to begin, that the opportunity sails right past us.
Life is so short. Adventures beckon. Let's get packed and head out on a new one today." (from Chris Baty at National Novel Writing Month
I took the note and after walking up the steps to the platform I read it. Again a thank you for riding Bart and an url for us to check out. I folded the note, slipped it into my bag and peered around only to notice that the platform was becoming littered with little green sheets of paper. Now don't you think it would have been more eco-friendly to post the new url on the overhead screens that flash the train times? The extra greeting was a nice touch and they could have left it there.
