Roads to Joy

After a rush of busy, just at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, the doldrums of mid-January are beginning to bite. I rushed around tidying up my workspace in the shed. I got my new Christmas present, a 3D printer, configured and making useful things. I replaced a faulty shower valve, and I configured our generator to power things in the house in the event of electricity failure. Busy, busy! But now, faced with an increasing sense of desuetude, I thought I’d look back over the year gone, and try to look forward thereafter, with a view to jostling my reluctant self into some sort of renewed endeavour.

The old house here has been so overwhelmed with renovations this past year that it feels as if little in the creative sphere has been accomplished. It’s been all go from February to November on building works, plumbing, electric cables, kitchen remodelling, supporting wall coming down, solar panel installation, heat pumps configured, en suite carved out of the warm craft room, shelved pantry created . . . the list just seemed to go on and on. That was a building year, that was, and we’re glad to see the back of it, frankly.

We’ll have a few good investments to make yet during 2025, to turn this place, at last, into our comfy home, but it shouldn’t feel anything like the upheaval we’ve experienced last year. Smaller projects that will enhance and amplify our big works. All reasonably facilitated as time goes by. So my own thoughts are turning toward creativity again, and for me that means dedicated, disciplined writing.

I love the shoulder-to-the-wheel structure of the daily grind, the routine, within which I can carve out characters, narrative, setting and theme. I hope to inhabit another novel, this year, I mean. The fields to the right of the dapper man in the ChatGPT-generated image above are full of a possible harvest. It’s exciting to me to think about the possible harvest I might glean through assiduous effort. Not in financial terms, though remuneration is always a delight if it arrives. No, this would be in self-fulfillment terms.

I’ve always believed, always seen the joy that comes with a flow state in attentive work. But beyond creativity, I guess joys also come in a realisation of some sort of understanding that might not have availed had the work not been put in. I’m sure that it’s with an ambition to understanding that I write. That ‘understanding’ now, I hope it’s not pretentious. I hope it’s more in a curious mode, a sense that things that might be hidden are more delightfully revealed if it’s not easy to find them. And so the hard work becomes important.

My hard work should come, I think, in a variety of Creative Writing sessions; I’ve signed up to three different groups, and I still have my fourth novel to be comprehensively edited by my friendly mentor. The hardest work will come, I expect, with my efforts in a novel-oriented writing group based in California but with active sessions around the world. This group expects, from its members, serious writing and listening, responding to critique, and really getting down to work. That is, bi-weekly sessions, with tasks set out clearly between. The other groups, one writing of personal choice to 550 word max, another poetry-based, will provide stimuli on a monthly basis.

I can’t wait to begin! [Well, I have begun already, in a few poetic efforts.] And maybe, just maybe, that work will re-kindle my efforts on my own various blogs (my writing process journal at BiomeNE47.com; my travel journal at HarryCarrieAndMe.wordpress.com; and my self-discovery journal here at RoadsToJoy.blog). All of these efforts have languished during our year of building renovations.

Bring on the space for creative thought, even as the frostiness of ageing creeps up upon me!