In keeping with my themes for 2024 this summer was to be 'The Summer of Writing'.

This theme didn't have a specific post or word count, but I knew I wanted to write more1.

I had a few things I needed to do to get this started. One of them included starting a writing cohort. I wasn't sure how I would do that but it turns out in early June Lacey was having similar thoughts. Mario and Trey had some interest as well and so we formed a writing group!

We meet every Wednesday (more or less) for about an hour.

I had really hoped that the forming the cohort would give me the encouragement and accountability I needed ... and it HAS!

But I also quickly realized that all I had calendared (really) was the Wednesday writing session, and so I set out to have a 30 minute daily writing session on my own.

Life has a way of kicking you in the ass though when you least expect it.

Roughly 10 days into my 'Summer of Writing' a work thing came up and kind of consumed all of my thought and energy. I realized quickly that something had to give, and so I looked ahead at my Autumn theme and borrowed from it a bit, while still keeping the spirit of trying to write.

The next theme was going to be 'The Autumn of Mindfulness' which included starting a meditation practice so I dove into that. I also decided that I needed to try to find something to do from a physical activity perspective. I live in the desert of southern california so the summers are brutal ( daily highs that can average 110F+) and being outside isn't something I really like, even in the early morning, before the sunrise, the temps can be mid to high 80s ... sometimes even the low 90s.

I decided that I would pick up swimming and going to the gym to help alleviate some of the stress from work.

That, in addition to the writing, seemed to be a good thing to work on.

During my Summer of Writing I only wrote 5 posts (including this one)

The articles had a total of 5237 words and so, from the perspective of writing, I managed to do some writing, but it wasn't really anymore than what I had done during the Spring of Transition where I wrote 4 articles with 3890

However, the ability to transition from one idea to another is something that CGP Grey talks about in his themes and so I don't feel too badly about it ... especially because the meditation and swimming have really been something I'm very proud of.

My meditation practice includes a 20 minute daily session first thing in the morning to help clear my mind for the day.

My swimming routine consists of swimming 3 days a week. When I started I could barely do a 20 minute swim. Just before DjangoCon US I swam 1800 yards in 54 minutes and for the most part didn't stop for a break. If you would have told me that in early July when I started I would not have believed you.

In a weird way the meditation and swimming kind of helped with the writing because it allowed me to stop thinking, which then allowed room for deeper thinking about my writing.

The stress of work has alleviated a bit and so I'm hoping that after DjangoCon US I'll be able to dedicate about 15 minutes a day to writing to start, and then ramp up to 30 minutes (similar to what I did with the swimming) and continue to swim and meditate.

One thing that I've found very helpful is to just add a little bit of a good habit and remove a bit of a bad habit. Sooner or later the bad habit is gone and replaced with the new good habit.

In the Autumn of mindfulness, which I will still try to do, I'll focus on eating right (I kind of eat like a 7 year old whose parents left the pantry stocked with a ton of junk food and then left for the weekend) so I'm going to work to get that under control.

All in all, it's been a successful summer of writing, even if it wasn't what I initially envisioned. But that's OK, and part of life.

As Mark Twain said, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."2

  1. How much more? I don't really know ... just more ↩︎
  2. No he didn't. It was actually Allen Saunders in Reader's Digest in 1957, I just like to attribute everything to either Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln ↩︎

This post is part 3 of the "2024 Theme" series:

  1. Winter of Learning
  2. Spring of Transition
  3. Summer of Writing

tags: themes