Before I dive into today’s post, I want to mention that I hope to write a post full of reflection on the amazing New York trip that I took my students on this past week. To do that, I may have to take next week off from producing a new post.
At times, ideas for posts flow almost without prompting, getting my hopes up that I will soon fill pages with the written word. At other times, these times coming far more often, I sit and stare at the page, stumped for ideas. I can come up with ideas that go no further than the topsoil. This entry comes from one of those times.
When I think about possible post ideas in the dry time, I circle around the same things, those in my wheelhouse, and realize that I have nothing new to contribute, nothing that I have not already shared some time in the past few weeks. Before I started this entry, I bounced around a few possibilities from something about running or teaching and something else I did not think about long enough to remember. I abandoned the ideas when I realized that I had enough words to fill a shallow poll, nothing more.
I know that I cannot bring something completely new to every single entry. No practicality exists in that. I also desire to avoid repetition, to stretch and grow myself as a writer. That’s hard to do, however, in a life that feels crammed full of primarily one thing, teaching.
During the school year, everything revolves around school. I optimize my schedule so that I can still fit in my workout before I have to leave for work where I spend a minimum of nine hours every weekday in a physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing job before coming home to do more things for work and life. I go to bed and do it all over again the next morning. Come the weekend, I carve out a little more time for running on Saturday morning, reading on both days, and church on Sunday. The rest of those two days, for the most part, I work. I have precious little time to squeeze in anything else so my mind goes to those topics: my current school environment and all its troubles, running and my goals and struggles, my well-documented, by myself, motivation difficulties, and a little bit of finances and travel thrown in the mix.
That’s where the title of this post comes in to play. I feel almost as if I eat, sleep, and breathe this one thing with the same people and talking about it to the other people in my life outside of that particular circle. I reach a point, fairly regularly, where I get tired of writing on these topics. If I get tired of writing about them, I know that the few people who read my writing must also tire of reading about them. So, where does that happy medium come in? How can I balance between writing in my wheelhouse while not boring myself or the people who read my work?
As often is the case, I do not have a concrete answer. I think part of it stems from the fact that writing about something just outside my wheelhouse takes work. Those sorts of entries cannot be completed in the normal time spaces I can squeeze out. It takes a little more work, a little more time. Sometimes, I start these entries, get a few paragraphs in and realize that I have written myself into a corner. I have to abandon the entry and try a different route to convey my point. Since I have limited time to write, this frustrates me and has trained me to avoid these types of entries and to stick to the easy tried and true. Perhaps that’s the answer. Branch out a little. Take risks. Keep Practicing.