Pedaling prose

It’s my first morning on the recumbent bike after spending several hours yesterday assembling it, with the extra soreness and pain of an already-hurting body the price I’ve paid for being unwilling to pay the price to some random person to come to my home and put the damn thing together.

I’m starting to sweat. That’s a really good sign that things are happening inside of me. My heart rate is up and calories are at the mercy of pyromaniacs.

Just outside my office window, leafy green branches are swaying back-and-forth. I wonder if it’s going to storm again today. Our lawn has several yellow patches already as we tick away the days into the heat of another Tennessee spring and I want to use the sprinklers as a little as possible. One reason is to conserve water but I’ll admit that the bigger motive is that I simply don’t feel like dragging the sprinklers and hoses across the front and back yards several times per day.

I aspire to begin each day with my ass in this chair and my Hokas on the pedals, although I might have to switch to unlaced shoes because my shoelaces are going whack-whack-whack against the side of the bike and for fuck’s sake if that doesn’t irritate me and trigger some OCD. I also aspire to hop onto the bike for bursts of exercise across each day, in between work calls and some project work.

My other lofty aspiration? To write new prose every morning, without a set agenda or topic in mind, and use my iPhone to voice-to-text the first draft into my ongoing Google Doc while pedaling away. If I’m going to be on my phone, I can’t think of a better use.

(I just moved from the recumbent bike to my office chair in front of my desk.)

However, there’s limits to that writing instrument. While I can produce an initial stream-of-consciousness-word-vomit-whatever-you-want-to-call-it, clarity and precision spike as my fingers dance across my wireless keyboard while I’m staring at the monitor I sync with my laptop.

This has always been the case for me going back to those early typewriters of my childhood and youth. The connections between my deepest creativity and sitting at a desk typing away travel well-grooved neural pathways. Like many of you I discover what I’m thinking and feeling as I write and that’s especially true when the phone yields to the keyboard.

There’s a real battle going on inside of me regarding whether, how, and when I should try to earn revenue from the writing I’m doing here on Substack. The more encouragement I receive from others regarding my work, the greater the surge in my lifelong desire to just write and earn enough to continue to just write. (SPOILER ALERT: The three books I’ve published on Amazon aren’t paying the bills.)

The end goal of my writing isn’t to become a famous or wealthy writer but to do more writing. The ends are the means. I never want to stop. I feel most alive and purposeful and nothing else has even come close, including the leadership coaching I do with business executives for my current revenue.

Do I have what it takes to put in the consistent effort day over day, holding nothing back, getting better with each piece because that’s what ongoing writing does as your life becomes an MFA, learning more about myself and the human condition along the way, arriving at the season I’ve dreamt about but am still not convinced that I “deserve?”

The more I write on this platform and engage with all of you lovely writers and readers, the less I want to spend the majority of my weekday hours coaching, consulting, training, building job aids, etc.

What does that mean? What do I do with all of that? Have I lost my mind? Is my inner hopeless romantic less tamed than I realize?

I’ve become fairly adept at synthesizing my writing with my full-time professional work of the past 21 years. But some success comes with losses that aren’t always identifiable along the way. While winning that battle of congruence, am I losing the war by letting the years slip by and reserving less and less of a “future” in which I’m a full-time writer who gets paid?

I came to Substack with a well-developed voice but it continues to grow and evolve, and I think a big game-changer is the interactions with many of you and reading your outstanding content. Across my life I’ve had times of immediate reactions to my writing (including when I was a local newspaper journalist and really pissed people off) bit this is at a different level.

I’ve tweaked my Substack bio during the past few weeks and I think it’s now very aligned with my purposes here. I really do want to just share stories and reflections that don’t need to fit any category or niche, and the main reason I call out “growth, loss, identity, and mindfulness” in said bio is because those topics organically “show up” far more than others.

And the declaration in my bio about respecting other persons’ abilities to “make their own meeting?” That is essential. We are inundated with advice, tips, offers of professional services, etc. I don’t begrudge any of you who are making a living in those spaces. They’re just no longer for me, and I want the “noise” of all the attention-seeking posts to be drowned out by the staccato heartbeats of people who want to have authentic connections with other human beings and hold nothing back in their writing.

I’ve birthed my completed books of the past two decades through the discipline of writing every day and usually having a target such as 1,000 words. I like the idea of writing a Substack article each day that’s at least that length.

This isn’t primarily to eventually justify paid subscriptions, but because there’s so much more percolating inside of me, so many nuances to notice and bring to life through these tapping fingers.

Who the hell do I think I am by remaining even a little timid about fully going after the one thing I’ve always wanted?