Musings of a middle-aged, divorced dad seeking meaning in the in-between.
A warm voice arriving at day’s end,
like a coat held open — soft, waiting —
asking, “How was it?”
The little dance of dinner plans...
You pick. No, you pick.
Two minds circling the same hunger,
never needing certainty to feel full.
The way peace settles
when you’re not holding the world alone.
And the gentle, chosen touch —
not by chance, not rushed,
but offered like a quiet vow:
I am here, and so are you.
It’s funny how maturity shapes the way we handle struggles. When we’re young, we might charge in recklessly, run for the hills, or drag our troubles behind us like an overstuffed suitcase. But as we grow, we learn — sometimes the hard way — that facing life head-on, with a little grace and a lot of resilience, feels a whole lot lighter.
If this divorce had hit me 20 years ago, I would’ve fallen apart — no doubt. Back then, I let hard times sink their teeth into me, body and soul. I’d bottle everything up, drowning in the weight of it, stuck in my own head until I felt completely hollow.
But now? Now I take life as it comes — one day, one moment at a time. I roll with the punches, not because it’s easy, but because I’ve learned that resistance only makes the hits feel harder. I’ve stopped gripping so tight, letting go of the need to control every outcome. Some days, I stumble. Some days, I stride. But no matter what, I keep moving — because standing still has never gotten me anywhere worth going.
1. To Get Started, Write One True Sentence
“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before, and you will write now.’”
2. Always Stop for the Day While You Still Know What Will Happen Next
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good, and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.”
3. Never Think About the Story When You’re Not Working
“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
4. When It’s Time to Work Again, Always Start by Reading What You’ve Written So Far
“When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start.”
5. Don’t Describe an Emotion—Make It
“In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me...”
6. Use a Pencil
“If you write with a pencil, you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof.”
7. Be Brief
“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”
