I want to write a book

I want to write a book.
Kind of.
What I really want to do is effortlessly and painlessly compile some words onto some pages and have somebody somewhere mail me large checks. I would gladly receive those checks at my farm where I’m content to never ever leave again.
If, due to only God’s power, my book is popular and doesn’t get me strung up by PETA (think back to my columns about chickens), I would retire. At 29. (Because of course this could happen in the next five months before I turn 30!)
But you know what I’ve been doing instead?
Everything else.
Lately, I have become a giant waster of time and avoider of work that in my bones I feel born to do.
Why?
Pinterest can motivate me for hours, but after all that cyber space motivation, I’m exhausted. Too exhausted to write.
So I take a nap.
Or convince myself that the items on that little shelf above my kitchen cabinets HAVE to be scrubbed today. It cannot wait. No time to write.
Or the garden needs tending (this is actually a legitimate distraction).
Or I need to do this or that.
This list could go on and on. And it has been for the last year or so that I’ve actually seriously considered that writing a book might be in my future.
Self-doubt. Fear. Similar road blocks in my brain detouring my motivation into self-made distractions.
I know I’m hard on myself (which may be a shocker to some people). But, I get real down on myself when I do something or say something or write something wrong. I can be a real bully to me.
And what if nobody wants to publish it or even read it? Or, what if it does create lots of attention but the negative kind? Lots of people in this country do not understand how we “hicks” live. (For the record, I believe we are the ones living right — most of the time!)
For my high school graduation, my Aunt Mindy and her family gave me a card with this Henry David Thoreau quote:
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”
I still have the card because I loved it so much.
It has lived on the walls of my college dorm, in my first apartment with friends, on the walls of my first home with Matt and now it is in a box of keepsakes.
Coincidence?
I used to be so crazy. So vivacious. So bold. So ignorantly brave. I cared. I dreamed. I wanted.
But after all these kids and all these responsibilities I have found quite the stack of reasonable and understandable excuses.
It’s not that I’m not content with my life and need more. I just feel drawn for some reason to write something down (I don’t even know what I want to say).
Who knows what my future holds?
But I don’t want to live the rest of my life ignoring my innermost stirrings and settling for being fenced in by my own insecurities.
Makes me think of something my Aunt Sue told me about a year ago.
I was practicing with the church praise group, and she walked up to me and told me how great it was to see me up there. I told her I was so nervous and wasn’t sure about it.
And my Aunt Sue (somebody I’ve known to have incredible strength and conviction) told me matter-of-factly, “You’re a Seneker. You can’t be nervous.”
Then she walked off.
She was serious, and she meant for me to take it that way.
To live the life I’ve imagined by confidently following my dreams, whether it be in the praise group or writing a book.
My plan is to write a book some day. But today I plan to dig out that old card and display it in my current life. To motivate my current dreams.