“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is that cab.” ~Twyla Tharp, from “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life”
As of the New Year, I’ve begun my own creative rituals. I, too, am rising daily at 5:30. I turn on the heater in my small, basement writing room, make my coffee and tend to my dog. I write three pages longhand in the Target notebook with hedgehogs and toadstools on the cover. Upstairs my teenaged kids are getting ready for school. My desk faces a large window that looks out to my snow covered back yard. Some mornings the sky brightens a deep, soft pink, a shade the snow echoes, and I find myself more staring out the window than writing. But no matter. I’m here. I showed up. This has become my ritual, my taxicab, the trigger to my subconscious. My brain knows. It’s time to write.
Beautifully put, Kathy. I need to get my habit back in shape. The holidays knocked it out of me.
Yes, same here! Her book is reminding me of the huge value of having some kind of structure & rituals to your creative life. This doesn’t come naturally to me, but it helps, so much. Thanks for reading, Myf!
I used to have a similar habit and it lasted for years. My husband would leave at 6:30 and I’d head out to my office in the garage every day and work until lunch. Now though he’s retired and I never know where he’s going to me. If I ask, he might say garage (downstairs with saws and hammers) and so I set up in the den inside, but five minutes later he’s in the den on the big computer doing some kind of something, asking me why the shredder isn’t working (the waste catcher not pushed in enough) and I have to flee. It’s been like this for a year and a half. I’m so behind on everything writing-wise I’m thinking about leaving the house after breakfast and spending the day in the library.
Uninterrupted time is so important isn’t it? I hope you can figure out what works for you, Gay. There was a long stretch of time where I only wrote in a coffee shop. I’d recommend good noise-canceling headphones! : )