On the Precipice, or Seeing Possibility

Possibility or just cookie dough?

Hello from the precipice of my children’s holiday break. We are reading CS Lewis right now, and are nearing the end of Prince Caspian. As Lucy, Peter, Susan and Edmund are on their journey, they are toiling along the precipice of a river, and so my kids asked me what this word meant.

“Well, it’s kind of like being at the top of a cliff,” I said, without looking up the word in the dictionary. Ah, got it, they replied.

I love watching them learn about words and then use them in their writing and in their daily language. Later, my daughter suggested we lived at the precipice of a hill, and we talked more about why (and why not) the word works.

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer, looking back at a bit less than a year of dedicated effort on what appears to be a memoir and persists at being important for me, and also all the times I have finished essays and bravely submitted them for publication. I am proud of that work. And. Nothing quite feels real, yet. No editor has gushed about my work, no essay has hit the big time. The book remains big and messy and uncertain.

When I started writing with determination back in March, I felt I was on a precipice of something new. Now, I feel like I am still up there, wandering around and testing where the best, next, strongest foothold could be. Despite the uncertainty, I am working on feeling comfortable with the concept of precipice, valuing the expansiveness of putting oneself out there in the world as a creator. Indeed, one is always on a precipice of some sort or another. The view up there is pretty grand, if scary at times.

So. Perhaps in the path forward over the cliff, when one is not magically led by the lion Aslan, we are learning to navigate possibility and rejection and working on the edge of our comfort zone. We are learning to trust ourselves from the heights of vulnerability and creation.

Holiday school break, looming, feels a lot like less possibility, less time for creation and more fullness of family and holiday doings. But, perhaps even this is in itself containing possibility for creation, because it is the living of life that makes us full of things to say.

Cheers to finding inspiration from this joyful or tricky or hopeful precipice you find yourself on, and the next one; in the possibility, in the fullness, in the busy of the season. I, for one, am planning on more time in 2020 for sharing my thoughts here, so do stay tuned.