Spring is for Starting Things You're Not Ready For

Springtime is once again looming on the ever-brighter horizon. Like the beginning of a new year and the requisite resolutions that accompany it, I often feel a burst of inspiration to start something new (or improve something old), but in recent years those urgent, insistent motivations are often out of sync with… well, everything else.

What do I mean? Well, let’s start with…

Spring 2019: The Pattern Emerges

Work was absolutely insane. I was on a team at Amazon Web Services that was supposed to be 3 people, managing 3 high-volume blogs; each of us owning one. When I started in that role in 2017, it was working fine, but the volume was pretty high. I regulary put in more than 40 hours a week to keep up with just my blog, and this was after having spent 6 years managing a blog at Microsoft; I knew what I was doing.

But then one of my colleagues put in her two week notice. She was let go that day because she was leaving for a competitor; she was going to Microsoft. The other half of our remaining team was due to go out on paternity leave any minute, which meant I would soon be managing the workload of 3 people for no additional pay. My 40-45 hour work week quickly ballooned to 60 hours plus weekends just to keep up.

That’s what was going on at work in the Spring of 2019.

At home, my 13-year old was in the midst of his newfound obsession with Hamilton and his 6-year old twin brothers had no memory of ever meeting their grandparents, who lived in Massachusetts (we were in Washington).

To them, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were just voices on the phone that they spoke to mostly on birthdays and holidays. We hadn’t taken a real vacation in years, so we decided to plan a 2-week summer trip to visit family and give our kids a full tour of the northeast. It would include day trips to Boston, a road trip up to spend a night in the hotel in Stowe, Vermont where their father and I got married nearly 15 years ago, a Phish concert at SPAC and a trip to New York City to see Hamilton on Broadway.

Trying to plan a vacation at home in the midst of chaos at work with the hope that by the time the time off came around, we’d have a new teammate and the existing one would be back from paternity leave was super fun (yes, that’s sarcasm).

Thankfully, it all worked out in the end, but only just.

Spring 2022: The Pattern Continues

Following our whirlwind tour of the northeast, all three boys agreed that we needed to move back to New England (well, “back” for my husband and I; the three of them grew up in Washington). Not only was all our family there—for the twins, complete with two cousins they shared a birth month and year with—they had seen everything we love about the region over the course of those two weeks and fell in love with it too.

Roadtrip!

They’d had all the food we missed (and understood why), they swam in the ocean (an impossibility without a wetsuit in the Pacific Northwest), they’d been to Boston, MA, New York City, NY, and Burlington, VT and found things to love about each. It was a whole new adventure, and they were ready for it.

My husband and I weighed the pros and cons of moving back versus staying in Washington and New England won. We started the process to get the house ready to put on the market…and then Covid hit. Our plans to move in the summer of 2021 had to push out indefinitely, but we targeted the summer of 2022, assuming it would be possible in the context of the pandemic. Once the vaccines started rolling out, we knew our timeline was realistic and so we began preparations with the intent to leave as soon as the kids were done with the school year in June.

The house needed to be packed, painted, staged, and sold. There were to-do lists everywhere—literally. I had white boards with lists of tasks for every room of the house with owners assigned and check boxes for when they were complete. There were logistics to coordinate with getting estimates for movers and making sure schedules aligned. There were a thousand decisions to make, and then even more branching off of each one.

That's when inspiration decided to show up. Not politely, certainly not conveniently, but insistently, relentlessly, refusing to be ignored.

I started writing The Strangest of Places in the middle of chaos—while my husband painted walls, while moving boxes piled up, while everything rational in my brain screamed this is NOT the time.

My husband would be in one room, rolling primer on walls. I'd be in another room, laptop open, writing about a twenty-year-old girl at a Phish show in 1995.

He'd get the brushes and rollers ready for the next coat. I'd draft another chapter.

He'd take a break to let the paint dry. I'd keep typing.

He did a great job, even without my help.

It's become a running joke between us that the smell of paint fumes must trigger a burst of creative energy in me. I’m thankful he has a sense of humor about it, because he absolutely did at least 85% of the painting that spring, and I love that while he gives me shit for it, he was fully supportive of my needing to let that inspiration move me brightly.

If I'd waited until after the move—until we were settled, until the new house was organized, until everything was perfect—I probably never would have started.

The logistics of moving would have turned into the logistics of unpacking. Which would have turned into the logistics of new jobs, new routines, new demands.

Spring 2024: The Pattern Persists

If you read my New Year’s Resolution post, you know that I felt the creeping dread that things were going awry. Well, they were, and I’m unemployed right now. It is what it is, and when you work in the tech industry as long as I have, you learn how to take it in stride. That said, I’m thinking about seeing if my husband might have a painting project he’d like to start, because right now, I’m stuck in a way I wasn’t back in 2022.

I’ve been wanting to start Book 2, but I feel as though this may be my first bout of writer’s block, because the words just aren’t coming. I can’t tell you how many times I sat down and stared at a blank page, waiting for something to say, but ultimately walking away with nothing more than “Chapter 1” written down.

I know from previous experience that there is no perfect time to start—or, at least, plan to start—something that matters, but sometimes having the desire to start them isn’t enough. Sometimes there’s a missing element of…something…and you don’t know what it is, or what will get you over that hump for real progress to begin.

You just have to keep trying.

The Myth of "When Things Settle Down"

We tell ourselves we'll start that project when things calm down. When we have more time. When the schedule clears. When circumstances align.

When things settle down.

Except they don't. They never do.

There's always something. Always a reason to wait. Always a more convenient moment just around the corner that never actually arrives. Meanwhile, the thing you want to create—the book, the business, the art, the career change, whatever it is—sits there, waiting.

Spring doesn't wait for perfect conditions. It shows up in the middle of late winter snow storms, bringing with it mud season and unpredictable temperature swings. It doesn't ask permission or wait for ideal circumstances.

It just... starts.

Spring is for Imperfect Beginnings

That's what spring teaches us every year: don't wait for perfect conditions to begin.

Seeds go into cold, muddy ground. Buds push through on branches that still look dead. Green shoots emerge while snow is still possible.

Nothing about early spring is comfortable or convenient. It's messy, unpredictable, frequently disappointing (looking at you, false spring in March).

But it starts anyway.

And so will I.

A friend recently posted on Facebook looking for leads on someone to dog sit for her while her family takes a vacation over the April break. I don’t know if I’ll have a new job lined up by then or not, but assuming not, I volunteered to do it. We could use the money and I could use a week of no distraction other than caring for and playing with dogs. I don’t know if I’ll get a sentence, a paragraph, or a full chapter down while I’m there, but I know I have to try.

I wrote The Strangest of Places in stolen hours between packing boxes and in the gaps between painting sessions. I wrote on lunch breaks, late nights and weekend mornings when I should have been doing something more practical.

I wrote it in the middle of chaos, not despite it.

There is nothing stable or secure about my current situation, so maybe leaning into that chaos is what I need to get started again. Maybe the paint fumes are a feature, not a bug. Maybe spring is the right time—not because everything is aligned, but because you're done waiting for it to be.

The Strangest of Places exists because I started writing it when the timing was wrong.

What could you create if you stopped waiting for the timing to be right?

I’m taking that dog-sitting gig next month to find out.