A Handwritten Month
February is short, and thus it’s a great month for trying out a new habit. It’s long enough to give a new thing a whirl to see how it goes and short enough to persevere in it.
This month, I decided to switch up my freewriting practice for the month, doing it (again) by hand and making it smaller and smaller as the month progressed. I already do a lot of pen-on-paper writing, mostly for praying, sometimes for grocery lists, and periodically over the course of my adult life, in fitful attempts of performing Julia Cameron’s magical Morning Pages practice. (That could be an entire essay; it’ll have to wait for another time.)
Though I love writing by hand, I’ve been a keyboard typer for most of my life too. I have memories of working-by-playing on my parents’ word processor long ago, those typing machines that allowed a writer to prepare and even edit a small chunk of digital typing before firing it down on the paper with machine-gun-like delivery. When my parents bought a desktop computer when I was in late elementary school, I gained enough proficiency in DOS commands to pull up WordPerfect; I loved working at words in that sublime word processing space. When Microsoft Word in Windows overtook WordPerfect, I remember feeling real interior technological displacement from that small but meaningful change to my digital competencies. I missed WordPerfect deeply and the operational masteries I had developed there.
This February, I invited myself to take a month-long bounded adventure in old, familiar terrain, and I didn’t call it Morning Pages, but it involved handwriting 750 words — approximately 3 pages on lined paper — before settling into writing on the computer.
No surprises, I started enthusiastically. As the month progressed, I shifted the “pens down” finish line to 500 words (two pages), and then to 250 words (a single lined page). Making it smaller helped me to keep doing it. Oddly, doing the single page of writing helped me shift into writing things smaller too. So it helped me make more livable, concrete actions for myself — not “write about the phenomenological method” but “write 250 words about phenomenology.” Small, stumbling steps, not grand gestures. It helped me get out of my own way, but not so far out of my own way that I lost myself altogether. That’s a delicate needle for me to thread.
Today’s the last handwritten day of this handwriting month. The only breakthrough insight I’ve gained is one I’ve learned before: making any task or habit smaller, more bounded, and less idealistic and less perfect serves my sanity and fills me with a very different kind of strength. For starters, that strength has a non-magical, yet deeply satisfying quality to it.
It also doesn’t seem to violate my God-given human frame. My attempts to make grand, impressive gestures are diminishing and paralyzing. They usually leave me feeling emptied and frantic. Small, steady, even weak attempts help me to stay in my cell — that is, to endure a little while at a simple, concrete task; aiming towards some kind of good intention — while at the same time honoring my frail, fragile, and limited humanity. That shift is equipping, not shattering; building, not destroying. It’s exactly how God works: he does not violate, overwhelm, coerce, or brutally invade (cf., Isa 42:1-4, esp. v 3).
This handwritten month was a great preparation for another preparatory season ahead: Lent. In the Western Church, Lent starts Wednesday, March 5. This season is one in which I’m sorely tempted into magical self-help/transformational thinking. Too grand! Lent marks my forehead with ashy dust, whispers sober reminders of my mortality in my ears, and points me up to the reality of God in Christ, whose strength is made perfect in weakness.
We don’t take up Lenten practices to be strong and thus earn God’s grace and favor; rather, Lenten practices help us to receive and metabolize God’s grace as ourselves, precisely in our human frame as it is, and to see afresh who and what we actually believe in. Yes, we usually discover that our common life-coping strategies cannot fill us with life: common self-delusions and ordinary illusions (esp. the religious ones!), habits and addictions, and secret and not-at-all-secret sins. Lent is a season in which we invite and receive the press of God’s authoring pen on the single page of our lives; his editorial skill in all the knotty sentences where we usually exercise a great deal of stubborn control.
If you don’t usually practice Lenten disciplines, I invite you to consider a small experiment in attentional Lenten practice, led and hosted by my dear friend and fellow writer, Rev. Courtney Ellis. Ellis is an immensely productive writer. She’s also wicked-smart and funny on social media (skillz!). During the pandemic, she started birding in earnest, and via Twitter (remember when it had a bird-related name), she received life-giving influence and friendship from other attentive birders, including from physicist, astronomer, and pastor Paul Wallace. (More about him here.) Then she opened the imaginative windows wide to many others with an experimental birding Lenten practice. Basically: Go outside for 10 minutes. Look for birds. Receive what God sends you.
Ellis calls it “A Bird from the Lord,” using language given to her by Wallace. (For all you hashtag-attentive folks: check #abirdfromtheLord.) Ellis wrote about the experiment here. She continues to invite others into it, and you can check out her Instagram page for others details and inspiration. It’s worth a try, and it’s certainly more about practicing open, outward attention to God and receiving the birds you are given — Oh look, a crow with a broken wing! — than performing it perfectly before others on social media. (Ellis would put that sentence in bold too.)
Lent is 40 days long; much longer than February. But, 10 minutes a day, receiving the birds you are given as a contemplative Lenten practice? I know it will be transformative, even in the smallest of life-giving shifts. Ten minutes of daily open, outward attention will move you towards tastes of deep, childlike time at the very least. As I’ve written before, Jesus was right about the birds and our mental well-being.
If 10 minutes is too long to bear (no judgment from me! read above!), make it 5. If 5 is too long to bear, make it 2. Even 1 minute of open-hearted attention, ready to receive, might be the best small beginning. Make it small enough to keep it sustainable, and just see what happens.
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PS. I appreciate your prayers for us and thoughtful messages. Thank you.