What are You In Search Of?

Take a staycation and refresh your perspective!

Greetings to my newest subscribers (more than 30 of you in the past 30 days!) and welcome back to my longstanding readers. Mahalo for hanging in here and for hanging out with me. If you are new to my Substack, you may be surprised to be finally hearing from me. Just as you joined, I took off to participate in the 1,000 Days of Summer collective writing project, in which 40,000 writers commit to writing 1,000 words a day for 14 days. But I am back now, and you can expect to receive new writing from me weekly.

If you found your way to this post without having subscribed, “subscribing” just means you get emails from me on Sundays with my latest Substack entry. You can enter your email below if youʻd like to keep reading…

When you last heard from me, I was worried that my writing had become pedantic and uninspired¹. And so, as I explained here, I took a break from this newsletter but not from writing. I wrote 14,000-some words over a two week stretch, just for myself, in search of inspiration and my voice.

For different reasons, I also participated in last yearʻs 1,000 Words of Summer Project, a project I learned about from my subscription to the Substack writer who founded it, Jamie Attenberg. Imagine - what was at first a pact between two writers to hold each other accountable to writing 1,000 words a day for two weeks has grown to some 40,000 participants. Thatʻs forty million words committed to paper or laptop screen EVERY DAY for two weeks, 560 million words in total.

I write a lot - I write a weekly blog post on the Hawaiʻi Life real estate website and I write a weekly installment here on my Substack newsletter. But that is me writing for an audience, polishing and editing and imagining what you as a reader need or want to read. I have been using the 1,000 Words project as kind of a literary summer staycation, holing up with my own thoughts for company, taking risks without consequences, finding where my mind wanders if left to her own devices.

Regardless of what work or profession or passion project or hobby or daily life commitments we might have, we go through phases. Lately I have been writing about how inevitably in life we encounter some disruption in our flow, some breakdown in work or health or family life requiring us to rethink our commitment and our day to day, week to week practices. Those of you in the real estate industry are collectively in one of those moments in your professional life. It is also early summer and maybe some of you have children recently graduated - or getting married. Remember that even changes we assess as positive ones also create disruptions in our flow.

Sometimes, less dramatically, there might simply come a moment when we hit a plateau. We lose sight of why we loved our work or hobby or field of study, maybe even why we chose it in the first place. We find ourselves going through the motions, maybe with resentment, maybe with no feeling at all, our minds elsewhere. In creative pursuits, we might experience a complete block, the work just not flowing. Or find it flowing, but mechanically. Thatʻs what I felt in my writing. Even if we have the dream job, a dream marriage, everything we thought we wanted in life, sometimes we find ourselves dissatisfied or anxious or restless or frightened or just a bit bored.

If this is is a feeling you resonate with right now, even if you feel the tiniest bit this way in some area of life, I offer you an Rx written illegibly on a possibly pilfered prescription pad - although my most recent prescriptions were transmitted electronically and a copy printed for me in the doctorʻs office, so consider your prescription to be already in your hands. You have permission - letʻs call it a prescription - to devise your own “1,000 Words of Summer.” Letʻs take a real or virtual staycation together. And this yearʻs theme is “In Search Of.”

Prescription: take one hammock, preferably near a beach or a campfire, along with some time to contemplate.

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A quick question to start: what might you choose to be in search of?

I declared that I was In Search Of my Lost Voice. Once I started writing my 1,000 words a day, that intention shifted. It felt like I was In Search Many Things, starting with a Topic.

Last year when I did #1000Words of Summer 2023, I had a specific topic I wanted to explore for my eyes only, a topic that felt compelling. As I wrote in one entry this year, (t)he best writing comes when there is something you have to say, a topic burning a hole in your pocket, in your bedsheets, in the flesh of your forearm. A topic that has to be explored because inside it, inside the not knowing and the miserable words, eventually some words with fire, some thoughts with original sin or original exaltation, some genuinely new thoughts will appear on the page and as a writer in that moment I think, “This is why I write.”

This year was not like that. I started the two weeks mainly wandering around In Search Of a Topic, a topic that could guide my search for Voice and Inspiration.

Finally I gave up, gave in, gave myself permission to be kind of lacking in purpose for once. I figured it was ok to just wander aimlessly. It did not matter whether I found my way or not - no one was there to judge my success. I wrote simply to write, starting wherever my thoughts started that day. Some days I wrote prompted by the advice or observations in the letter sent by the project leader to all of us writing a thousand words that day. Some days I started with whatever was even a bit memorable in the previous ordinary day of my life. Then I just wandered my way through a thousand words or so and called that good enough.

And most days within that wandering I found something of interest, something new, a phrase or an idea that felt like a decent bit of writing.

I often forget the importance of just taking the first step. If you are In Search Of something, it helps to simply start looking. To look sideways, to look backwards, to look about you out of your peripheral vision, to look with a soft focus rather than with laser intensity, to look in your nighttime dreams or in the lyrics of the song playing on repeat in your head. Let go of the plan for once. Allow yourself to pull at random threads of thought that glimmer with an unexpected color. Respond to the images that gently tap you on the shoulder until you turn around and recognize them with a burst of emotion. Follow the bread crumbs of a random coincidence, an unexpected irritation, your joy at discovering a new gelato selection in the market, anything at all that threatens to awaken your curiosity, maybe even your creativity.

I thought so much about “Authentic Italian Ice Cream Made In Hawaiʻi”. But isnʻt it beautiful? As in so gorgeous I did not want to order because theyʻd have to disturb the roses.

I hear you sighing. What if you donʻt feel you have the energy to raise your head from all the work and pressures, donʻt have the bandwidth to explore, even to feel curious?

Sometimes when we feel exhausted, what we need is to simply sleep until we no longer need the rest. Sometimes when we feel exhausted, what we are really In Search Of is inspiration, mystery, the beating heart in what we do with our lives. Sometimes to recover both energy and curiosity, we need to go away from home, wander aimlessly, have unexpected encounters, get lost in crazy illogical dreams, until we remember and understand where home is, and realize that our treasure was buried there after all.²

1. I am so grateful to those of you who reached out directly to tell me that you were enjoying my writing and my voice, and encouraging me to keep this going. That means a ton to me.

2. Yes, that is a reference to The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. For new readers, more of that story here.