750words

Somewhere between January and February of 2023 I had just finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear and decided a habit I wanted to create was writing every day.

One of the main points made in the book is the mindset shift that needs to occur to make a habit stick. In the context of building up a writing habit: I identify as a writer, a writer writes every day.

Where I get tripped up sometimes is the age old question: But what comes first? The chicken or the egg? To decide you are a writer without beginning to write? To begin to write without yet believing you are a writer and letting the belief catch up with the new action?

It’s a bit of both. When I decided to write everyday, I am building the evidence to support the belief that I am a writer. The believing reinforces the doing in turn. Consistency blooms when the inner and outer changes work together in harmony.

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I made the decision to write 750 words every day, typically every morning, by utilizing 750words.com for 30 days until my free trial expired.

Some days I would wake up itching to get my hands on my keyboard.

After a morning routine of meditation, stretching, oil pulling, warm water with apple cider vinegar and lemon (one of my more disciplined eras of the morning routine) I’d sit down at my computer and my fingers would dance across the keyboard until the very validating and inspiring counter on the right hand corner of the 750words.com browser would tick from 749 to Congrats! You’ve met your goal for today!

Other days I would be short on time or hungover or completely uninspired and those same 750words would feel as painful as a discussion post for a class you got roped into taking because your friend a year older said it was “so chill”, yet you ended up reading about Russian history and political relations twice a week.

Hi (insert name of peer here)! I particularly resonated with your analogy contrasting the piece by Aleksandr Pushkin to the excerpt by Anton Chekhov, your eloquent articulation surrounding the examination of the prose in translation between the 19th and 20th centuries led me to consider… 

However it was always the days where yesterday’s flash dancing fingers felt more like overworked backup dancers when the unexpected would happen.

With no direction or purpose to my writing, when I just began, it was like my words took on a life of their own.

Sometimes it took hundreds of words about feeling tired or stressed or ramblings about what I had to do that day before we got rolling, but eventually my tired fingers were running across the keyboard all the same.

It is one of my most favorite sensations, the words flowing through me.

I’m not thinking, I’m not even doing the writing, but my fingers are moving and words are showing up on the page and often when I awaken from the focused trance-like state and read back what has written itself I am inspired and kind of moved and very surprised because the words don’t even sound like me.

This happens more often when I’m handwriting, as there is something sacred about a pen and paper in the holy land of the pages of a bullet journal. But with 750words, I had similar experiences, and they made me want to keep showing up even on the days I didn’t feel like it. 

All of that being said, my 750words did come to an end. My free trial halted, My morning routine did loosen up a bit, school picked up and the months got warmer.

I thought maybe I would continue just writing in a google doc but without that silly little countdown clock in the right hand corner of my browser the belief/action pairing that writers write everyday ceased to outsmart my excuses.

James Clear would probably say I should’ve stuck with it for another 30 days (60 days is the recommended lower limit dose for effective habit formation).

But instead of viewing this as ‘another failed foray to committing’ I think I’d like to look at it as a lesson.

Evidence that I can try something and stick with it, 30 days is more than 20 which is more than 0.

Starting somewhere is infinitely more informative than never starting.

Maybe along with shifting your beliefs to update your identity with new evidence, you have to show yourself that you are capable of generating evidence in the first place.

This too then is an opportunity to show myself I can generate new evidence.

An attempt to remind myself of the powerful portal that can reveal itself when I sit down and put a pen to paper, dancers to the dance floor of my keyboard.

On the days that feel the hardest and most pointless and most benign– these are the days that the habit is born.

Simple and plain, the writer writes not to block out the noise but to transmute it.