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Since writing “Curating My Way Into Existence,” I find myself periodically having to restart my existence writing. I am at one of those junctions yet again.

The process is familiar now. I realize I am feeling depressed and no amount of exercise will pull me out of it. Slowly I feel the need to find a yellow pad and sit for a while with my yellow pad and free write. There is no intention. There is just me and a pad of paper and a ball point pen.

The reminder trigger this time was a blog post by Austin Kleon for “The Thirty Day Challenge.”

“Someone once asked me to distill all of my books into one piece of advice, and, off the top of my head, I said: “Try sitting down in the same place at the same time for the same amount of time every day and see what happens.”

“In Steal Like an Artist, I wrote about comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s calendar method of daily joke writing:

You break your work into daily chunks. Each day, when you’re finished with your work, make a big fat X in the day’s box. Every day, instead of just getting work done, your goal is to just fill a box. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

I printed out Kleon’s simple check box for the 30 day challenge and started writing.

Every Day I will “free write for 30 minutes.”

Then after two weeks or so I get the desire to start writing on my blog. For a couple of days I play with topics that I might want to write about. Finally I open up WordPress and write my first blog in several months.

The magic of this process is getting the eternal swirl of angst and stresses and wild ideas out of my head and onto paper that I can see with my two eyes (not my inner third eye). For me there is something that happens with this loop of idea to hand to pen and back through seeing what is being written that frees my spirit. Things start to make sense. Connections are made that I couldn’t see in the internal swirl of half baked ideas.

Writing myself back into existence. It is what I am driven to do.