For at least twenty years, I have enjoyed walking labyrinths. Labyrinths are maze-like structures that have been used as spiritual tools for centuries. For the past seven years, I’ve been walking labyrinths throughout the northeastern United States, and blogging about them. To learn more about labyrinths, check out this page at the Labyrinth Society. To find labyrinths near you, try the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator.

The labyrinth at Sparta United Methodist Church is in a large field behind the church. Surrounded on three sides by dense trees, the field feels very open and welcoming. The labyrinth itself is an 11-circuit Chartres-style, with a gravel path and inlaid brick walls.

I approached it this morning at the end of a very long period in which I hadn’t written anything – no blogs, no newsletter, barely any journaling for that matter. At least I hoped I was at the end of this period. I had an intention and expectation of returning to writing later today, and I was nervous about it. How do I get back into it? How do I get back on the wagon? And how do I explain this to my readers, assuming I even have any anymore?

So I entered the labyrinth with this question on my lips: How do I start again? (Whenever I walk a labyrinth, I go in with a particular question in mind, and I nearly always receive an answer or at least some response to the question.)

As I walked, the first thing that came to mind was, “It has to be sustainable.” I’m in the middle of a two-week vacation from work, and it would be easy to imagine myself getting into a writing frenzy during this time off, only to have my regular routine crash back in as soon as I returned to work. I don’t want that. I want to be able to write regularly again. Writing is so important and so meaningful to me, and it can help to keep me in a healthy place emotionally.

I continue to walk, and I thought, “I could make a commitment to write every day.” No, that just won’t work. Some days I just don’t have the time or the emotional energy to do that. That’s just asking for failure, and one or two missed days could just lead to giving up again. So I thought maybe I could instead commit to each day, either writing something or coming up with two ideas of things to write in the future.

With the exception of my book Darkwater, pretty much everything I write is short-form. So one of the first challenges of writing for me is figuring out what to write about. And I realized in the labyrinth that the act of coming up with a prompt and the act of actually writing about that prompt are two very different things to me. It seems like they require a different mental muscle, a different type of mental energy. And I think, I think, that I can probably find the energy to do one or the other each day.

And I’m hoping that once I get over this initial hump, once I actually get started, it will become easier to continue to do it. It’s like the difference between “starting friction” and “sliding friction” that I learned about in physics class. An object sitting on a stationary surface resists movement, and a force has to overcome the object’s “starting friction” in order to get it to start moving. Once it’s moving, there is still friction resisting an ongoing force, but that friction (“sliding friction”) is measurably smaller. I think that’s true in life as well. I’ve been experiencing a lot of inertia lately. Hopefully this will enable me to move past it.