How You Think
You may have heard the phrase “how you live each day is how you live your life”. I like the practicality of that—what is life if not a collection of days, weeks, months and years?—but I also chafed at what I originally felt was some sort of judgment. If I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t have time to write (thanks, day job, kids, husband, family responsibilities, domestic chores and more), if I wasn’t writing every day, then was I not living the life I wanted to have? As a writer?
Now my day job is all about writing—my own and coaching others. So now I can buy into that phrase? But just because I had made changes in my own career didn’t mean that was possible for everyone, so were they not integrating writing into their lives if they didn’t write every day? I had trouble reconciling the statement.
Until I realized it’s not what you do, specifically, on a daily basis, but how you think. If you think like a writer—you have story ideas buzzing around your head, you’re interested to pick up the next book off your to-read pile, you can’t wait to join your next book club discussion, you decide on a new direction for your plot—then it is part of your everyday life.
Even if you can’t write for an hour, or even five minutes, you’re still living the life of a writer.