Dan is trying to encourage me towards some TV. That’s OK. It’s a Thursday night, and both of us are feeling that slow drag towards the end of the working/school week.
I reply that I think I might do some writing. Which is good, because, you know, it’s 7 November, and I have been avoiding writing since the start of the month.
Dan agrees. ‘Are you in the zone?’ he asks.
‘I’m in the run up to considering being in the zone,’ I say.
When did writing become like pole vaulting, I wonder.
Not just a run and hurl yourself over a bar, high jump style. But an even more gravity-defying scheme: grab a big bendy stick, choose an even higher bar, run like mad, and hope that somehow you will hurtle over it.
I don’t know how many people grow up wanting to be pole vaulters. I suspect there are more people who say they want to be writers. I’m pretty sure there are, because one of the online groups I became part of seems to be full of people saying they want to be writers.
All week, I’ve been ignoring the high bar. I know there’s a crash mat on the other side, sure, but writing doesn’t always feel like that. Â (There is always the delete post option if you think you’ve really crashed big time, but that doesn’t always encourage you into writing.)
I’ve been waiting for the words, the ideas. A bit like the pole, if you will. The right words, the right bit of flex…you can feel the movement building up already when you have those.
Trying to hurl yourself over an impossibly high bar with no stick…that would be plain stupid. (Especially given the thoughts about the crash mat, or possible absence thereof.)
Your alternative would be to drop yourself from a great height, and somehow find a bar – and a crash mat – to land on the other side of. And yes, I know the Queen parachuted out of a plane at the opening of the Olympics, but no one saw her make it over the bar either.
(Don’t worry. I do know about the opening. And yes, I gasped too when she spun round, in the earlier footage at the palace, and you realised it really was the woman herself.)
But sometimes, someone pushes the pole into your hands, just through uttering a handful of words. Or through you pausing for a half-second, between hanging up the washing and considering the sound of the rain outside – noticing something.
And before you know it, your brain is revving up, and you think you’ll have a go at it again. Muscle memory. Great thing, that. And that height must be possible, surely, or they wouldn’t have invented the sport, would they?
How do you gain the courage to consider flipping your body off the ground, propelled by a bendy stick? I don’t know. It’s not something I’m planning on trying. Any time soon.
But that run up, that sighting something high and lofty, and up-in-the-air exciting? The heft of the words in your hands, under your fingers as you type?
The grunt, as you set the computer before you and just begin. It is about performing, yes, and it isn’t about performing at all.
It’s setting your own bar, raising it, time and time again, and then daring to consider that you might surmount even that.
One thing, though. There will be no wearing of shorts during the composition of this post.