ABSENT
All at once, evenings have switched from hastily moving chairs to the front garden so as to soak up the last rays of sun with a gin & tonic on to the greyer toned variety that begins closing in as 5:00pm approaches and brings about the desire to hibernate. Time to light candles, question whether tonight is the night to light the wood burner (not yet) and put on some background jazz… or perhaps this seasonally apt playlist. My embrace-the-season appetite demands that dinner be the full-on autumnal kind – pumpkin soup, any soup in fact, something cooked low and slow and everything with a healthy helping of warming spice.
After a summer spent by and large absent from here, I feel a sense of renewed enthusiasm again for my own creative work – a feeling that arises at this time without fail and is solely attributed to the autumnal bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils/Nora Ephron effect. It’s a feeling I’ve missed these past months as my focus had to be directed elsewhere.
Having been at this blogging thing for almost fifteen years, I’ve gone through several incarnations of finding ways to earn an income from it. A topic that usually rears its head when someone unfamiliar with the concept of creating and monetising digital content asks what you do, and one that’s sometimes accompanied by a quizzical look that leaves me feeling like I should go out and get a “real job”. After all this time, I realise I’ve learned to roll with those moments and remember that it’s none of my business what other’s think of me or indeed the work that I do. Instead, I relish the sense of freedom that the choices and directions I’ve explored over the years have furnished me with in midlife and I remain silently grateful amid my lack of further explanation.
Having moved away from what sometimes felt like the murky slog of trying to earn income from creating sponsored content, I instead now focus on a Coastal Creative client – a hugely talented local artisan florist who I knew and shopped with for a few years before I began working with her in April 2021. And summer is full throttle wedding season, so together with my annual decision to be more available to H in the long school holiday, there wasn’t a lot of time left for furnishing my own digital home with the words and imagery I would have liked to. Not only that but it’s all too easy to use up all your creative energy in one place. On the rare occasion I found myself with an allotted couple of Simply Start Living hours, I would sit and stare blankly at the screen, feeling I had little left to give and not knowing where to start or what to do first. I don’t think the intense summer heat helped much either.
Ironically I think my beloved Mac was in tune with this whole mood. As the temperatures increased and my own pace slowed, the computer we’d had for so many years and upon which I’d tapped out the majority of my blogging career, began to get slower and slower. Every single process became unbelievably painful and that ever-lurking, spinning beach ball of doom brought forth a constant stream of expletives and threats to dropkick it out the window on a daily basis. Then, on the day before we headed off to Cornwall for our annual week of summer respite, it sputtered out in fitting style with a smatter of random code appearing briefly on the screen before going dark for good. Gratitude for the concept of iCloud storage doesn’t even begin to cover it.
So here we are, a new season, a new Mac (I could honestly envelop it in a loving hug every morning when I see how fast it does what I ask of it), and a new sense of enthusiasm. A new resolve to divide up my time more efficiently so that I can focus on my own content too and a plan to evolve it over the coming months.
A plan that, without the feeling of flux that permeated the summer, probably wouldn’t have begun to take form and shape. On reflection, being absent felt necessary – amid the hazy glow of pink that comes before the crisper skies, the annual summer slump that precedes the enthusiasm of autumn – I found some much needed space to recalibrate. I just didn’t recognise it until afterwards.
