“You can’t wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club.” -Jack London
My heart almost always longs to write. Lying on my bed on a depressive day, picking out the ballerina slipper in the swirls of the flowered wallpaper border on my wall, I wish I could write about what it’s like to live like this.
(Does anyone still have wallpaper borders? And what I mean by the ballerina shoe is not that my wallpaper border has them pictured in it–but the way the flowers are designed, I can pick out a cute shoe about every 12 inches. I used to find the same face over and over in the tiles of our bathroom walls when I was a little girl.)
I want to write about Andre’s droll comments on a school morning, shading a watercolour flower, the books I’m reading about writing, the niggling fear when I feel better that I’m headed for a manic episode.
But I’m always waiting for the perfect moment, the coming together of random thoughts, and something beautiful and harmonious to happen. It never does. “No one hates himself more than a writer who isn’t writing.” -Laura Oliver-
I’m not saying I’m a writer. But I’m a wannabe. Does that count?
(True to form, I will spend half of my blog post whining about wishing to write but seldom doing it. It’s ludicrous.)
It helps to dash off a quick Instagram post. But a lot of you who read here aren’t on other social media. I journal every day too. But it’s the sharing it with others that makes writing most meaningful to me.
These quiet days at home are teaching me new things. I feel like I’m learning to know my children and Dan better. It’s so uncanny to go to bed on Saturday night and know that there’s no church the next day. No nursing home singing. No Bible study. And no school schedule.
Like usual, I try to stay faaaaaaaar away from the politics and debates surrounding this whole virus thing. I long for peace, health, and kindness like all of us do.
I’ve been painting cards. 
We went on a walk in the cold this afternoon. Here’s a snowflake on Tori’s dress. 
I’ve had a week of good emotional health after long, dull weeks of flatness. I’m so very grateful! I don’t know why there’s been a change, but I’m thanking Jesus.
Well. My inspiration fled as soon as I had a good, uninterrupted time to write. Here’s some C.S. Lewis that our deacon put into an email he sent out to people from church this morning.
CS Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) – In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb.”How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of a painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
