The Schedule of Now
A creative prompt for rethinking time and putting yourself directly into the present.
Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.
Usually I write these weekend missives ahead of time and schedule them. But then there are those other times when my own schedule gets a little overloaded and things don’t go according to a perfectly dialed plan (when do they ever?).
When that happens, I get up on Saturday morning, make a cup of tea and sit and write for a bit. I actually really enjoy these moments. It doesn’t feel like catching up on something, or like I need to get the thing out of my way before moving on with the rest of my day. It’s a little pocket of time when the words get to flow, I’m a little less precious and critical about what I write because I know it just needs to get finished.
But when I woke up this morning the power was out. Hard to put together an online newsletter when the power is out. Instead, I went outside and looked at the soft colors of the morning sky, blended with the morning fog. I debated if I should go and track down the camp stove to make some tea.
It reminded me of the time a few years back in the advent calendar when the power went out and I wrote the entire thing by hand. By the time the power came back on, I just took pictures of what I wrote and sent it out. It was entirely different from what I had envisioned for the schedule, but it was one of my favorite things that I wrote and shared that December. If you’re curious, here it is.
In our modern lives, a power outage can be jarring, particularly if it lasts for a while. We’re dependent on power, and an outage usually has an immediate impact that alters your approach to what your time looks like.