a simple act with a single intention

Ten years ago today, I sat at my dining room table with some significant bedhead and a mug of black coffee and started writing this blog. Why did I call it 37days?

I didn’t begin it as a blog, though it used a blogging software. That is, blogging wasn’t my intention–leaving behind my stories for my daughters was; the blog was a convenient container. It was a simple act with a single intention.

I didn’t know anything about blogging. Write short posts was the prevailing wisdom; my posts were 2500+ words. Write every day, the experts said; I posted once a week, on Mondays.

What is the point of your work?

So I did it all wrong. Because that wasn’t the point–building a blog audience wasn’t in my vocabulary. Instead, I only focused on a single intention–leave my stories behind for Emma and Tess as fully, deeply, and honestly as I could.

And so, I wrote one essay a week for two years, and a publisher called to say, “we’d like to make a book with you.”

What is the power of a single intention?

A former colleague used to tell me that when he taught young actors, the first thing he taught them on stage was that you can’t play two intentions at the same time on stage and do either of them honestly or fully. So if you are in the play, “Hamlet,” you can either play your part and warn Hamlet, or you can try to get the audience to love you, but you can’t do both. Split intentions minimize our impact, and our clarity, and our purpose.

That writing, 10 years ago, is the clearest example to me of how it feels and what it means to operate from a single intention. It was glorious; I was in love with language and how words fit together and do or do not flow. How syllables punctuate meaning, how black ciphers on white pages create whole worlds. I sat for hours each day, caressing each word, fitting it in here and there, moving it, finding out what the story was really about in the process.

It changes when your book gets published and people notice and the publisher wants another book. It changes. What has taken the place of your work becomes your work–being an author took the place of writing from a single intention for a long while, but now I am back. Six books later, I feel fully back, finally.

Happy birthday, 37days. I look forward to the next 10 years with you.