Sometime back in May I stepped onto a conveyor belt.

My dad was dying and then died and that whole experience felt like I had boarded a moving walkway. I was simply swept along with whatever was happening as grief surged and sighed and sung its hymns.

After the funeral, after the scattering of the ashes, after the inability to look at any photos that included him, after all that had passed, I went for my annual girlfriend trip in the first week of July. It was a wonderful chance to regroup, to laugh and cry and enjoy deep friendships.

It was on the way back from that reprieve that I found out about my friend’s brain cancer and stepped onto that other conveyor called cancerland.

I’ve stepped off a few times, like when we took our trip to the U.K. in August, but for the most part I feel that when I wake up in the morning…it’s already moving. I simply step aboard once I swing my feet out of bed. I hear the little wheels grinding forward and I see where the day will take me next…at least I pretend it’s forward, but really, who can tell?

It just seems that I spend my day responding to the next request, the next place, the next connection. In between I laugh a little too hard and cry too easily.

These are not a complaints. This is simply an observation of my life at this point in time. It seems that I have relinquished all pretence of control, finally recognizing that it was a tenuous delusion at best.

As a result, I have found that I have been able to deepen my practise of trying to be present. My daily goal is to try to be available and respond as best I can to whatever currently is.

On my best days I feel a fluidity in my not-knowingness, a way to see my life as something I am expected to show up for, but to have no idea of what is next or how it will all work and what is required of me until it is presented.

I don’t really know where this conveyor is headed, I just know that I’m on it.

On my less-stellar days, I feel a slight panic, an anxiety that chews at the edges of my mind while I stare at the ceiling in the pre-dawn hours and think about all the writing I want to do, the art studio that gathers dust, the pages that remain blank. I talk myself off that insomniac ledge with calming words and deep breaths and somehow it all does look slightly better in the morning.

But yesterday, it occurred to me that a middle way might be the answer. This smacks faintly of wisdom. It seems I don’t have all these wrinkles and grey hair for nothing. Because it appears that I am slowly losing my entire life’s default mode of; if it can’t be ALL, it has to be NOTHING.

Instead.

I am proposing a middle way.  My plan is to carve out a little piece each day that will give me the feeling of the constancy of something that is only mine, a way to quit using the world as an excuse for not accomplishing what I say I want.

I discovered this idea in a new little book called Writing is My Drink. In it, Theo Pauline Nestor suggests that perhaps one could write for 15 minutes a day. Set the timer and do only that one thing.

Surely, I could pull that off?

I am declaring this new plan today. This is my public declaration. My way of pinning myself to the bulletin board of commitment.

Tomorrow I will step off the conveyor belt for 15 minutes and I will write for my own private project. It will not be a blog post. It will not be answers to the myriad of backed-up emails. Nor shall it be posts to Facebook. It will not be a scribbled journal entry. It will not be the newspaper article that is due for publication. It will not be the magazine piece that is also due. All that will get done. But this, this will be for me.

It will be my work. My writing. Mine. Experimental. Fun. Answering questions that simmer in the back of my brain. Just writing. There will be no internal threats or rewards. No goals. No results-driven plans. I truly have no idea what it will look like.

I will just carve out this one piece of constancy before I get back on that looping track called life.