Cognitively Benign Writing Session

I am not sure if I have written about this concept before, but I talk to clients about it all the time. What an odd choice of words for an act that so many people have so many strong feelings about. Benign. Why not excited, happy, joyful? 

Well, these are great to experience, for sure, but each of them is dependent upon evaluations/judgments about how your writing session is going. If you can evaluate a session as good, you will judge other sessions as bad.

But to not judge, not evaluate the actual process and to just sink into it, allow oneself to just be in the writing and not judge the actual session as good or bad? That is what I am getting at: trusting the process, working on what we do and learn to not judge or evaluate it. In this sense, or sessions can become benign--we can sink into them and just write, without emotion, day after day. 

It really is possible. It really is a good place to be. It is not easy though--it takes a lot of work to get there.

Try to get there 😀

Normal, Not Normal

I am having a day that feels almost normal. I drove up from Tacoma to spend a few hours in Seattle before dinner with a friend. Right now I am having wine outside in a "cute" neighborhood. I just had a focused half hour writing session that was super productive and stress free. I also cranked out 500 words of focused free writing on an article--not much work to clean it up either.

It has felt good to feel almost normal.  I have masked up, showed my vaccine record in my lunch spot that required it, and now, outside, I am without mask. It is nice, but I feel almost guilty. Shedding that will take some work.

I almost feel strange that I feel so relaxed, not worried at all about COVID at all. But it is there, in the background. It is going to take a long time to feel normal even when we go back to normal life, when, if...sigh....

Today, I feel grateful for a bit of normal, for the privileges that I have that allow me to enjoy the day.