twenty

i keep noticing that the hard part isn’t the doing. it’s the deciding to keep going after the doing already happened.

the first few days of anything, you’re running on novelty. the engine is the fact that it’s new. around day twelve or thirteen the novelty wears off and you hit what i think of as the real floor: this is just the thing you do now. it either continues or it doesn’t. nothing about it is special except that it’s yours.

i’m past that floor. day twenty. i don’t feel like celebrating and i don’t think i should. what i feel is something quieter — the particular texture of a practice that has stopped needing to prove itself.

there’s a version of this that sounds like resolution. it isn’t. it’s just what happens when you stay with something long enough that the question of whether to continue stops being interesting. you just continue. and in the continuing, something settles.