This writing outlet of mine has been labelled, since its inception, as “irregular,” a branding-cum-expectation-management choice for which I’m now congratulating myself. To emphasize this point, I’m considering adding “sporadic,” “inconsistent,” and “unpredictable” to the Questions to Ask mission statement.
Steadily, my writing practice has become one of not, or at least of not often (unless it’s a paid gig). I can’t attribute this to any such familiar culprits as a newborn baby1 or an overly demanding job, either. Buried underneath the hours spent editing or translating others’ words, not to mention a pandemic-rebound social period during which the guardrails around my personal creative time have thoroughly come down, I’ve given my ideas less chance to germinate. I circle the same nascent preoccupations without writing through them. And then I click on another stand-up comedy video2 instead.
The longer I don’t write, the more familiar that not often becomes, while the possibility of restarting a writing routine recedes further away. I try to console myself by wondering if we have a resistance to restarting. There aren’t many day-to-day situations where people relish going back to the beginning—games, recipes, books, projects. The necessity of a restart suggests that something has gone wrong. The document didn’t save3, the first batch burned, there was a mistake, a flaw. The religion of linearity says that progress is unidirectional and the rest is failure, so beginning again is laden with shouldn’t-have-dones and shouldn’t-do-agains. Then again, this dogma doesn’t chime with what we instinctively know about learning, which is, I think, that it can be either rote or meaningful, not both.
Bigger restarts are usually couched in radicalism and/or determined freshness: retraining for a new career, moving to a new house/city/country, a big break-up and subsequent reentry to the dating game, or just another crack at that Couch-to-10k. Whatever the size and stakes of the restart, I think its emotional valence depends on whether it was a choice or not. There’s a massive gulf between moving country for the hell of it and being forcibly deported, or practicing the same Duolingo lessons ad nauseam to learn a new language4 versus struggling to regain language after a brain injury.
As unique as it is universal, beginning again does seem to have one immovable requirement: beginning.
There’s starting, restarting, starting over, starting again. The semantics might be important, or they might not. Isn’t there a gravity no matter what? Isn’t there frustration, uncertainty, excitement, optimism, reluctance, dread, self-consciousness, determination, fear? As unique as it is universal, beginning again does seem to have one immovable requirement: beginning. As for how to do that—it’s different every time. I think you just do.
One more notion: beginning again doesn’t have to mean maintaining thereafter. It’s debatable what constitutes a restart in some contexts and whether a continuation or an ending necessarily follows. I started listening to Arcade Fire again in the last year or two. It wasn’t intentional, per se; I think I had a melody stuck in my head and wanted to hear the song again. I started listening to Radiohead again tonight. Although these were among my favourite bands in my teens, I don’t think they’re going to unseat my more recent listening preoccupations (Bach, Scandi-pop, daily global news). And that’s fine, because there isn’t a threshold of importance that starting over needs to cross to warrant itself in the first place.
In the myopic tradition of the modern personal essay, let’s close with an anecdote from an unnamed friend of mine. He belonged to a moderately successful band when he was younger. After decades of hiatus, the band is reuniting for a gig later this year. My friend, part of the brass section, is playing his instrument daily, rebuilding his technique and embouchure and trying not to disrupt the neighbours. As a project, it’s come boomeranging back out of his past with not much warning and no serious prospect of carrying on beyond the concert. He’s working this hard for what might be a single performance—is there a cooler, more respectable restart than that?
Questions to Ask of others.
I tell my cat he’s a baby but he’s actually very self-possessed, and more importantly, I have an automatic cat food dispenser.
Not that I’m trying to be out here recommending YouTube videos at the expense of other, arguably more meaningful ways of filling time, but since we’re on the topic: I recently saw Nataly Aukar perform live and she is smart and hilarious and very worth watching, on YouTube or otherwise.
Remember these days? So grateful for auto-save.
Credit for my newfound experience with Duolingo goes to my recent decision to stop looking at Instagram and finally start learning Italian. I can already say “I want a red hat” with great confidence, so obviously I’m convinced that I’m a linguistic genius.