Beginning In The Middle
Where I'm at today
My focus is pulled in many directions these days. I’m in the middle of:
global pandemic (lest we forget)
husband retiring
kids in college
parents in their 80’s
preparing to move after 24 years in one house
the annual reflection on work, time, money, energy, plans.
Moving is the big weight right now. The thought of picking up each and every item under this roof and making a decision about it can be paralyzing at times. I put a wooden spoon in the utensil drawer thinking not, this goes here, but is this coming with us? We have five and this one is only my third favorite. On Friday while attending the FutureBook21 conference via live stream, I cleaned out a whole drawer of my desk and it felt like victory. One of the things down in the bottom of that top drawer was my Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal by Julia Cameron. The last time I wrote in it was nearly four years ago. And now it’s sitting on top of my printer. That’s really not progress. The answer lies somewhere between KonMari Method (does this spark joy?) and Swedish Death Cleaning (how can I make someone else deal with this crap when I’m gone?). Wish me luck.
Regarding work, I wear three hats at present. I’m an audiobook narrator. I’m an audiobook producer. I am a narrator coach working with actors on everything from performance to business. The pandemic hasn’t negatively impacted our industry, especially compared to some others. We were already remote workers, so if anything our problem was mainly that, suddenly, everyone was home making noise during our recording hours. The demand for our work stayed strong, though, with over 71,000 titles produced in 2020. I worked on about .0007% of that total as a narrator, and my production company, Lyric Audiobooks, was responsible for about .0014%. I mean, let’s keep things in perspective. In the midst of it all, several narrator colleagues and I launched narrator.life, a continuing ed hub for actors who narrate audiobooks.
I have some plans regarding all three of those areas but today, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, is not a day for announcing things.
I sometimes think of life’s concerns and activities and foci as a lava lamp, with blobs bubbling to the top, changing form, settling, other things blooping up, never exactly the same combination of things. I feel the shifting more acutely at the moment (see above list).
Yesterday morning we woke up to 21-degree temps, several trees in the yard still hanging onto their leaves. Once the sun hit at just the right angle, those trees snowed their leaves onto the ground with a clattering, and by nightfall they were bare. The rather dramatic event was the culmination of a weeks-long, much more subtle process.
Maybe moving is going to feel like that.