Warrior Bunny says The Next Thing was here all along
A look back at my first year of The Next Thing
I’ve never been good at looking backwards, or even sideways, really, when I’m in motion. Can’t read in moving cars. I have a whole protocol to avoid motion sickness. In cars, you look out the front window and focus your eyes hard on the most still, stationary thing you can see—a pole, a highway sign, a mountain. Don’t forget to breathe. On boats, you look at the shoreline. Breathing is important here, too. Being on a boat that goes beyond where you can see a shoreline sounds like pure torture to me.
In life, however, looking backwards is instructive and I guess it makes sense to recap the forward-progress oriented “The Next Thing” one year in.
I started writing “The Next Thing” just about a year ago to chronicle my adventures in self-reinvention, but the domino rally of big life changes had really started in the spring of 2020. As global pandemics have been known to do, COVID disrupted things, including but not limited to the full-time faculty position I’d held for 11 years. There were others, but I had originally envisioned this newsletter as a narrative evolving around the career piece.
Logline: Long-time writer, editor, professor thereof, and newly minted empty-nester moves to the outer reaches of the ‘burbs, from whence she seeks her next professional adventure.
It hasn’t happened that way. I have plenty of work, mostly editing and writing, teaching a class here and there, the collage of piece work I’ve thought of as a temporary situation while I look for the next thing. What have I learned by writing about it? Well, as we say in the academic study of composition, “writing is generative.”
What that means is that often we don’t know what we think until we write it. That’s the opposite of how most of us are taught to conceptualize writing, which is that we first think a thought and then write it down—et voila, done.
When we think of writing as generative, we have to give up some control, which is already the most terrifying thing about writing. We can tell a composition what we want it to be, but it may have its own ideas and as good writers, we have to listen and negotiate and compromise and respond. And after decades of giving this advice to my students, I am giving it to myself.
It’s a good metaphor for life: Instead of trying to wrestle that square peg into the round hole, what if I accept it as it is? If freelancing is what I do now, how can I make it into something meaningful? Instead of thinking so much about the next thing, what can I do to make this thing the thing?
We’ve just transitioned from the Year of the Tiger to the Year of the Rabbit according to the Chinese zodiac.
According to TheChineseZodiac.org,
[T]he year of the rabbit is like a gardener, pruning and nurturing existing plants to make them flourish. So, the Year of the Rabbit 2023 is not a time for flashy new inventions but rather for improving what we already have.
When my daughter was born under the sign of the rabbit, I remember reading that, while rabbits may look delicate, they’re stronger than they appear and are good at getting themselves out of difficult or dangerous situations. Do not make the mistake of underestimating the bunny. I love the watercolors by Lily Seika Jones that imagine the smallest of woodland creatures as heroic warriors, often outfitted with medieval weaponry and facing down their nemeses.
I like the idea of strength in small packages and I like metaphors about gardening much better than metaphors about moving vehicles. After the Tiger’s year of disruption and revolution, I am looking forward to the rabbit’s softness, patience, and calls to introspection, its focus on relationships.
As I consider this year’s resolutions or “soft launches of vague goals” as I described them for a writing lesson I gave at Lark & Owl, I’m reconceptualizing The Next Thing. Instead of looking down the road, I’m going to look at my immediate surroundings. I have several houseplants in need of repotting. Perhaps I will repurpose that square peg as a plant stand.
"we don’t know what we think until we write it." I caught that line too...so very true (every time!). Thanks for sharing the latest on the journey!
Lately I’ve also thought that “we don’t know what we think until we write it.” The stories I tell myself in my head seem much flimsier when committed to paper. Somehow it’s hard to write something other than the truth, because committing a thought to paper makes it open to objective evaluation.