Showing all posts tagged rest

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

A Dormant Season

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In my workshops at teachers’ conferences, libraries and for writers, I often speak about building in a dormant season for creativity and rest. A period of time where we are intentional about doing nothing, so we can replenish our spent energies and allow our creative impulses to regenerate.

This sounds wonderful in theory, but I realised recently how difficult I find a dormant season in practice. When I’m writing a new manuscript, I try to maintain a steady rhythm, where I work for a little bit each day so I don’t get too far away from the characters and the story. But sometimes dormancy is forced upon us, due to vacations or the needs of others or health concerns or simply life being life, and interrupting us from our best-laid plans.

This happened to me in August. And I struggled against it. I find it frustrating that even when I’m teaching about certain skills and strategies, like taking a dormant season, I can still be ridiculously slow to recognise it in my own existence. We had a couple of trips planned, and then an unplanned trip to the island late in the month to help our kids move into their first basement suite off campus for the upcoming university year, and by early September I recognised how far away I felt from the novel I was writing.

I wish I could say that I was calm about this. But I wasn’t. I got pissed off, at myself for not progressing on my book when I had planned to write all summer, and then irritated by my family members who kept me from writing. I didn’t enjoy how this resentment made me feel, but I stewed in it for more than a week before suddenly remembering what I tell others: for a dormant season to be effective, we have to surrender to it. To enjoy our lives without feeling guilty that we aren’t working on a creative project.

I had completely missed this part of the process. So I reached for my journal, and reflected on this season of dormancy I’d been in, and why I felt myself longing to get back into the writing of my murder mystery novel. I remembered my Ruby Finch Books tagline: Intuitive Courage. Somewhere along the line, I had once again lost myself and my sense of identity and purpose. I’d been at the mercy of circumstances and other people and life itself without recognising or claiming my own agency.

It felt so good to realise that I can always choose my response. I could be angry about not writing, or I could acknowledge that I had been in a period of creative dormancy, which meant that a new burst of creative energy could bloom in me if I allowed it to. In the four seasons of nature, winter is the dormant season. It’s followed by spring, the explosion of growth and vitality, but we only get the beauty of spring because the trees have been dormant in the winter.

I truly believe that the same seasons are necessary in our own lives. And sure enough, once I stopped having a temper tantrum about my writing rhythms and progress being disrupted for a month, I began to feel the slow, gathering momentum of fresh insight for my book. I would lay in bed at night, ready to drop off to sleep, and my intuition would connect one storyline with another in a way I hadn’t considered before. I would realise something in one of my character’s backstories that informed their current choices and motivations.

Writers live for those moments of insight. I suppose I’ll never know if I would’ve had them anyway, if I’d been writing during August and into early September, but they came to me so insistently and yet gently when I wasn’t writing, so I have to hope the brief dormant season made a difference. Now I’m back into the story, writing nearly every day, and the work has a fresh energy behind it.

I’m working with a new counsellor this month, and one of our goals is to help me identify these patterns in my life faster. I don’t like to feel lost and annoyed for weeks on end when I could simply choose a better response. Believing that a dormant season will help my creativity flourish is a healthier choice to make than stewing in frustration about being unproductive.

What are some ways you’ve seen a dormant season lead to fresh insights and replenished energy in your life?

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships

3 Words for 2024

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

Every year, I pick 3 words or a phrase to focus on. In 2024, those words are savour, intentional, and receive.

With savour, I’m determined this year to notice more of my life as I’m living it. I read somewhere that when we plan for the future, thinking about something that has yet to arrive, we are missing our life as it’s being lived in the moment. This resonated for me, because I do it so often.

Savouring goes hand in hand with slowing down. I want to notice my delicious food as I’m chewing it. I want to pay attention to the person I’m talking to when we’re having a conversation. I long to stop fixating on my to-do list or some future event. My life (and your life!) is happening right now, at this present second. I’m determined to revel in it more. To cultivate appreciation for the life, career, and relationships I’ve built. To be here and now and to savour it all, no matter what, for this is what it means to be alive.

My second word, intentional, is designed to help me triage my biggest priorities. I’m 51 now, which means I have a lot of decades to look back and reflect on, while also hopefully having decades still to go in front of me. I want the way I spend my time to matter. I want to be more decisive about it.

I’ve been focusing for a few years now on rhythm. I work, and then I rest. I’ve learned to stop seeing leisure as wasted/non-productive time. It’s just as important. If we don’t choose to rest, eventually our body will choose for us, but there are times when I worry about the hours I’m spending chilling out (especially when I’m under a deadline or have a lot of moving career pieces on the go). This year, I want to be intentional with my time, whether I’m working or resting.

My last word is the hardest one for me. I do not know how to receive from other people. I’m unskilled and unpracticed at it. I know how to give to others – I can do that blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back – but receiving?? It feels foreign and strange and brings up all sorts of insecurities about how I don’t deserve it.

The subject of care has been a big one this past year for Jason and I in our marriage. I kept telling him that I wanted to feel cared for by him the way I would imagine he feels cared for by me. For ages, he couldn’t understand what I meant by this. My counsellor really helped me understand that I know how to give, but not how to receive. For Jason, it’s reversed.

We set these patterns up in the early years of our marriage, and now, at the 25 year mark, we’re trying to create more balance in how we function as a couple. It was really helpful for me to understand that I’m not good at receiving care, help, and love from others. I protect myself from it, and then become resentful and angry that no one is loving me, which isn’t exactly fair to the people closest to me.

With Ava moving out last year to go to university, I began experimenting with the changes in my parenting relationship with her as a grown-up child. Her love felt different to me, with her not living in our house. I was able to practice receiving some love, care, and nurture from her in a way I’d never experienced it before. This helped me open up to the love and care Jason was offering as well.

It’s been humbling. And beautiful. I still have so much to learn. Giving comes naturally to me, but I can also attest to how satisfying it feels to receive care from others. I’m inching my way into it, reminding my scared child self that I deserve love and attention too, and I don’t always have to be the one to give it. Learning to receive is going to take me a lot more time, but it’s a project I’m happy to undertake.

What are your words for 2024?

In Books, Identity, Movies/TV, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Uncategorized, University, Writing

New Season

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I’m heading into a new season this fall, beginning my two-year full-time MFA program in Creative Writing at UBC. We’re meeting in person, which will be a huge change after moving online for the the last 18 months of my BA. With vaccinations available to everyone aged twelve and up this summer, it seemed possible for a “return to normal” in September, but classes begin next week and the variants are still spreading at alarming rates.

If we’ve all learned anything during this never-ending pandemic, it’s to expect change at a moment’s notice. We plan, and we hope, getting vaccinations when they are offered, wearing masks indoors to stay safe, thoroughly washing our hands, and trying not to take unnecessary risks. We have no guarantees, and we try to manage our fear.

In any new season, I usually feel a mix of joy and dread. This fall, I have lots of different emotions crowding to the surface. I’ve loved my five month break from academia. I’ve read loads of mystery and crime novels, slept in, watched some great TV, played cards with Jason and the kids, walked, practiced some yoga and wrote. My three guiding words in this season were: rest, relax, rejuvenate. I wanted to be prepared and ready for the new challenges of being a full-time MFA student.

Part of me mourns the end of the summer. The other embraces it with open arms, as I feel like I prioritized rest and leisure, so I hope I’ll see the rewards once I jump back in to classes and assignments. I’m also going to be a TA for the first time for an undergrad writing class. This both excites and scares me. We never really know if we are up to a challenge simply by thinking about it. We have to jump in and do it in order to really find out.

We have another unexpected change in the form of Ava taking a gap year before starting at University of Victoria. For an entire year, I’ve been emotionally preparing for her to leave home, grieving for her while she was still here living with us. And then at the end of July, we found out that she wouldn’t have a place to live on campus, so after a flurry of searching for off-campus housing that didn’t exist or was ridiculously expensive, Ava made the decision to defer her admission for one year. So she remains at home, working a couple of part-time jobs to save more money for school next year.

A lovely surprise because I don’t have to let go of her quite yet, but still a change that I wasn’t expecting. Next week, William starts grade 10 at a new high school in our district, so for him it’s a new season as well. Something in my nature loves predictability and certainty, but too much stability becomes stale. We do need a bit of variety and spontaneity to keep us engaged and growing.

The older I get, the more I understand that I can’t think my way through change. I just have to walk it out. Trying to forecast exactly what will happen is a fool’s errand. Situations are too complex for that type of guesswork. As we say in the recovery movement, an expectation is a premeditated resentment. I’m trying to “cherish no outcome” as a friend of mine says. Instead I choose to believe I’ll have what I need for the challenges ahead at the moment I need them. Not before and not after.

Tomorrow the calendar turns over to September and a whole new season begins. What’s in store for you this fall?

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Relationships

Feel Through

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

“You know how to push through, now it’s time to feel through.”

I’ve been seeing a new counsellor for the past few weeks, and in my last session she suggested it might be time to start feeling my way through instead of putting my head down and trying to power through like I usually do. The simplicity of the phrase “feel through” has been helping me slow down and stay in the moment more.

We live in the information age, where logic is worshipped above all else. My counsellor has this visual of a line drawn with her finger across her throat and then her hand raised to the top of her head. She does this when I’m processing a thought verbally but I’m staying completely in my head instead of moving down into the heart space where my feelings are stored.

She repeatedly says, “Stay quiet for a moment and notice what is happening in your body.” This is so new for me that I find it uncomfortable, but simply breathing and feeling gets me much closer to the breakthrough I’m looking for. Getting out of my head is critical for this process to work. Now, when I’m talking to her or to others, I’m likely to stop mid-sentence, draw a line across my throat and indicate my head, and then start again from a soul place rather than a brain place.

This feel through stuff is powerful. It’s the engine of our lives. The pain and grief I’m wanting to work with doesn’t dwell in my head. It’s in my body. Ditto for the memories I’m trying to access in order to understand where some of my faulty coping mechanisms originated from. I have to go below the line of my neck to find those, and I know I’m close when I start shaking or crying before speaking about them.

We’ve all been through quite a year in 2020. In these quiet days before Christmas I like to spend time with my journal, reflecting on what happened while looking ahead to a year with fresh possibilities. There’s a lot of sadness to feel before moving on to more pleasant emotions like hope or joy. The only way out is ever through.

I wish you peace and rest this December, along with space to feel through instead of simply pushing through. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

In Culture, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

Renewal

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Renewal

My word for the summer of 2019 is renewal. I want to rest, first and foremost, but with the intention that the rest is leading me somewhere new.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about fresh ideas. In our current social media-frenzied world, where trite memes are shared by the millions every hour, thoughts that carry some weight and meaning are more valuable than ever.

I had coffee with a new friend recently, and when I told her about the speaking and writing I’m doing, she offered me her marketing services. “We’ve got to let more people find you,” she said. My answer was, “I don’t want everyone to find me. Only those who are really invested in the kind of work I’m doing.”

I’ve been ruminating on this conversation, because when she said that short videos could help me reach a wider audience, I could see that this was probably true, but I said, “I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing.” To me, the interesting part of the work is innovating a new way to communicate and operate. I want to focus on my own path, not trod the same one others are already walking.

Which leads me back to renewal. Ideas are valuable and we must nurture ourselves in order to be in the right frame of mind to implement them. Having a crazy busy schedule doesn’t allow space for innovation to bloom. Rest, white space and peace are required ingredients for the work of renewal.

Lately, I’m understanding just how critical rhythm is to creativity. We need a dormant phase for the ideas to develop and grow in the dark, before they are ready to inch forward into the light. It’s lovely to feel the stirrings of something new and refuse to give in to the temptation to rush the process. This summer, I’m determined to allow renewal to happen by making the space for it.

This past week, we celebrated William’s graduation from grade 7 and Ava passing her written test for her learner’s driving license. High school for William and driving for Ava: two new steps to fit into this summer theme of renewal. I’m so ready to leave elementary school behind with its daily agenda messages, endless parent emails and field trip driving. On to the next stage.

Happy start of the summer to all of you, my wonderful and treasured readers and friends. May we all experience renewal in our spirits, bodies, minds and hearts.