Attitude of Gratitude

Natasha is keeping me company a lot these days as I push to add words to the page, and KouKi keeps stopping by to lean against me for drive-by cuddles. Santino isn’t one to bother me much while I’m in my office, but he is sure to hop up onto our bed every morning and evening to collect his cuddle allotment. Others might say “they’re just dogs,” but I know better. Especially since Felix finally gave up the ghost against whatever illness or infection had led to his suffering the past few weeks and left another hole in my spirit–even though he was “just a fish.”

Best of all, my hubs, a talented, generous spirit who supports and encourages me in ways that push me to grow and learn alongside him. Who sent me the link to quotes from Luther Standing Bear this week when we struggled again with news of more violence both in our country and abroad. Who liked my response of an article citing the Dalai Lama‘s view that “[humans] created this mess, we should be the ones to solve it.” He also sent a site that evaluates organic claims in order to provide useful buying guides for food-source conscious people. And an article linking the psoas muscle to fears and anxiety, in case anyone is suffering from mobility issues.

Luckily, and partly because of the spur from the office to participate in a walking challenge, we’ve been pretty good at staying mobile, despite all the family obligations, holiday, and wet weather. I racked up 30,350 steps. That wasn’t quite to goal for the work challenge (though it did beat my ROW80 goal), and since this is a progressive challenge, I’ll need to make sure to take a few of our longer walks this week.

Now that we’re at the tail end of NaNoWriMo, I’m also officially conceding another miss in the total word count column. However, despite all the life that happened this month to derail my focus, it was still in one significant way a win: I wrote fiction words EVERY day of November. Some days it was only a hundred or two. But my average per day over the course of the challenge was almost 900. If I can keep up that pace, I can actually finish all three of my current WIPs by February. Of course, editing and revision will need to happen after that before I can think of any kind of release plan for next year. But I’m tentatively encouraged that I might be back on track with my writing career. As Gayla likes to say, the word production brain has its own muscle, and it needs to build up over time, too. Apparently several years of focus on school and work made mine wimpy, so I’m grateful for the NaNo challenge to have helped me work on rebuilding that stamina.

I will have to work on finding more balance in the pursuit of words, though, since it’s been a month since hubs and I got to cuddle and chill at home. Somehow our date nights more recently have been out in the company of others–while fun, not quite the kind of restorative balm we both crave.

So I’ll keep pushing for balance and reminding myself of how much I have to be grateful for, and I’ll be back again next week. In the meantime, check out how my ROW80 cohorts are doing.