This is the time of no goals. The days are short, Daylight Savings is two weeks off, and already the cold is setting in. We are in a strangely listless time. Through the summer and the fall, I’ve moved through some athletic goals I had set for myself, and the last of these, the Head of the Charles, finished up this past weekend. On Monday, I woke up a woman with no goals in sight. At least no athletic goals in sight. It was not an entirely pleasant sensation.
Anyone who’s ever been in a play or a concert or who’s planned for and competed in a big race is familiar with that feeling of bewilderment and sadness that comes hot on the heels of the cast party or the crossing of the finish line. You’re tired or sore or hungover, or any combination of the above, and you desperately need and want the rest that’s offered by the day off. You’ll take whatever you can get, tucked in around work or family or social schedules. And you’re exhilarated for the achievement you’ve just completed. But you’re also at a loss. What now?
There’s a line my mother used to say, quoting from the Greco-Egyptian poet C.P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”. What are we going to do without barbarians? my mother would say, in her own version of the Greek (τι θα κανουμε τωρα χορις βαρβαρους). Cavafy’s poem describes a populace who have put everything on hold because they have received word that the barbarians are on their way to take over. But when night falls and
the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer
the poem’s final question arises: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?”*
When my mother said it, she was being funny, though she chose the line well to comment on those moments when we were at a loss and when even the absence of something negative seemed a deprivation. Recovering from a cold? What are we going to do without barbarians? Resolving a dispute with, say, a defiant neighbor? What are we going to do without barbarians? I’m wondering the same thing now. The trail races are finished, the long bike event is done, and the regatta is wrapped up. What do I do now?
I’m not being entirely honest here to say I have no goals. I am, in fact, signed up to run a trail race in two weeks, to see how many 3-mile loops I can complete in six hours. But that’s an add-on. I haven’t been building up for it, training for it. A friend suggested it and I said sure, and so I’ll do the race. The truth is that there is no major event on my athletic horizon for some time. From now until, say, April, it’s just, well, living.
I need goals. This should be obvious by now to anyone who has kindly read the previous newsletters! I need goals not only as an athlete but also—especially—as a writer. I need them because I am a writer. To look ahead to the wide-open sea of simply writing words one after the other day after day after day: there is a Greek word for that. Pelagizo. Πελαγιζω. I become sea-addled. It’s too much (just like the sea is too much). And so I need to break down my writing life into increments I can accomplish without considering the larger and seemingly infinite whole.
This past Monday, with the regatta behind me, I felt utterly at sea (there’s that image again). Monday’s mental and physical fatigue joined up with a creative listlessness that I’d been experiencing for a month or two. Even though I can usually count on my athletic endeavors to keep me motivated as a writer and to help me sustain my focus on the rather amorphous thing that is creativity, this past fall, I found it difficult to care, honestly. If writing and publishing are a sort of call-and-response between writer and reader, it had begun to feel to me as though the lag between the call and the reply had grown too long, the connection become too attenuated. Yes, I write fiction because I enjoy the process. I enjoy solving the myriad problems of diction and image and character and story and style that go into writing every few hundred words of prose. If I didn’t enjoy that process, it would be time to quit, since that enjoyment is—as I remind my students—the only reward from writing that you can guarantee. This past fall, the reward had dimmed for me, and I wasn’t sure quite why.
I had overlooked one crucial thing: rest. The athlete hates a rest day. It feels like you’re not working to improve. But still you do it. You take that time off. One day a week, and, if you’re doing training blocks, you dial it back for a block every now and then, on schedule. Rest is, after all, one of the training intensities. Even I with my no-goal time of year have built that in on purpose. I’m going to stop and just live and do sports, but without some major project (to use Kilian Jornet’s word for it). What I hadn’t noticed as a writer was that I had been pushing myself creatively for a long time without pause. What felt like listlessness to me was, I realized, burnout.
As with so many things, once you identify and articulate them, they might go away or fade. Simply realizing that my listlessness was burnout allowed me to allow myself to take a step back. I decided it was all right to just stop working on something for a little while. I’ve been taking a break. I’ve been rebuilding my stores of creative energy and fueling off of the athletic endeavors of this past month to give me structure. When November starts, I will likely sign up informally to NaNoWriMo with a group of friends. But this year, I’m setting a goal that’s a kind of anti-goal. Instead of aiming for something like 2,500 words a day (who does that?!) to complete a novel in November, I’m asking myself to write maybe no more than 300 words as I chip away at this next novel project. My goal is to go slow, to be patient, to focus on the small so the sea of possibility won’t overwhelm me.
And the regatta? It was fantastic. I am very proud of myself and my teammate in the double for rowing exceptionally well and, for us, exceptionally fast. The result wasn’t what we’d hoped for—thanks to the bumper-car situation that is the Head of the Charles with its tight turns and narrow bridges and malignant buoys. But our performance was, frankly, superb. We couldn’t have done better. I plan to hold onto that feeling of accomplishment independent of the result. That’s exactly the kind of accomplishment you can take into the season of no goals and remember that, even though the barbarians have not arrived—because the barbarians have not arrived—you can build and grow and improve.
*Translation: Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard