Coming back home

Coming into Manly Beach, Sydney, on the ferry. 

 An overseas trip is great, especially if you’re catching up with grandchildren you’ve never seen face to face before.

It’s not so good when it completely takes your attention away from a work in progress, and you come home feeling you have to start from scratch.

Which is what’s happened in my case. All my creative energy has gone into getting to know little people I’ve never met before, or ones who are now several years older than the last time I saw them. Or spending spurts of time in unfamiliar cities, finding my way around them. Or sitting long hours in airports surrounded by thousands of people I don’t know and will never know.

It’s a week since my wife and I returned home, and the creative brain is still saying I’m too tired, I’m jet-lagged, I can’t be bothered…let me sleep!

No doubt many travellers recover from long flights and unfamiliar places in a day or three. I’m not quite as young as I was – who is? – and for me and my wife, the recovery process has seemed much longer than we’d have expected.

So what to do? Submit to procrastination or work out a way to make some progress again? The lazy brain would be happy to go with the former. The soul that’s made of sterner stuff says something along the lines of ‘seize the day’ and makes me uncomfortable if I dare to lay my head down for a moment or two.

So…I can say to myself:

'One option is to read through the draft as it stands. Make notes. Say what you like, what you hate. Remind yourself that before you left for overseas you were already thinking that what you have in hand isn’t the way to go and that a rewrite of these early chapters is necessary.

Don’t berate yourself. Life always gets in the way of creativity.

Do say, as you sit down and scroll yet again through Twitter-cum-X that you didn’t miss the news while you were away, so why do you need to know so much about it now?

There’ll always be news. There won’t always be time to create.'