What Is Mine to Carry?

I’ve just let go of a project I’ve been dragging around for more than a decade. A book manuscript that, in the end, doesn’t need to see publication. Making this decision—for all the right reasons—has been so freeing that I realize now I didn’t know what a burden I’d been carrying. I am breathing more deeply for having let it go.

It turns out that I wrote that manuscript for myself. I needed to process my father’s death, my midlife marriage, my experience of the passage of time. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who support my creative efforts, who have long encouraged me to “finish the book and get it out there.” People who want me to secure a book deal with a major publisher. When I tell them how hard that is in today’s marketplace, they respond with compliments and entreaties. It’s kind of them, really. But it’s not realistic. And it’s no longer my dream.

I know it might not sound like much of a burden, and in the bigger scheme of things it’s not. You don’t need to publish a book to survive. Fair enough. And yet, when we take on what society wants of us, against our better instincts, it can, indeed, become an unnecessary hardship.

Our Lord, we belong to you. We tell you what worries us and you won't let us fall.

(Contemporary English Version)

When facilitating small groups, I invite people to set down what they don’t need for our time together. What can be put aside, at least for a few hours? What can you let go of for an afternoon or perhaps a lifetime? Often, when our time together comes to a close, participants discover they no longer need to concern themselves with whatever they had put out of their minds.

Long ago I learned to love the process of writing and I stopped putting so much emphasis on the product of it. Sure, I’d enjoy another byline, that rush of seeing one’s name in print and one’s handiwork out in the wild. Maybe that will come, maybe not. Still, I will write, trusting that what matters in the end is not what I produce but how I process the stuff of life.

—Amy-Lyles Wilson, Contributing Writer

Photo by Vanessa Garcia : https://www.pexels.com/photo/rucksacks-leaned-on-fence-near-lush-meadow-6324270/