---
title: 'A Constant Process of Not-Falling'
date: '2012-04-27T09:52:51-04:00'
permalink: /a-constant-process-of-not-falling/
tags:
    - life
    - writing
---

The primary bit of awkwardness involved in not-blogging is the transition to once-again-blogging; there’s guilt and embarrassment, and an overwhelming need to explain where one has been and what one has been doing.

For my part, I have been doing [this](http://www.mla.org/news_from_mla/news_topic&topic=567) and [this](http://www.library.northwestern.edu/hda) and [this](http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2011/04/11/nyu-press-media-commons-to-test-online-peer-review-in-project-funded-by-the-mellon-foundation.html), and most of all, [this](http://www.mla.org/news_from_mla/news_topic&topic=573). Among a couple of dozen or so other things.

It’s all fantastically gratifying. But I’m aware that as I’m doing all of that I’m continuing to not-write. And I’m also aware that I never really feel good about my productivity, my focus, my creativity, and so forth, unless I’m writing.

I keep announcing here various stabs at breaking the log-jam of not-writing, and then find myself continuing to not-write, overwhelmed by all of the other things in which I’m invested and involved. This is not one of those stabs, and it’s certainly not a declaration of breakthrough.

But it is a call to myself to keep rebalancing my priorities, to keep remembering that my life outside my official persona requires actual attention.

It is also a call to remember, as I told someone yesterday, that balance isn’t something you achieve. Balance in life, I think, is like balance in yoga: a constant process of not-falling. Hundreds of tiny adjustments, every minute, that produce stillness out of motion, calm out of panic.

So: reassessing, correcting, recentering. Transforming not-falling into balance, and not-writing into something more.