Sunday is traditionally a day of rest and resetting. At the bottom of the page, there will still be a prompt but today is all about rest. Today we celebrate the power of the circuit-breaker.
I was twenty the first time I discovered the power of a circuit breaker. I’d been battered by a series of traumatic events that left me almost unmade.
How far, I wondered, would I need to travel to get away from myself and from the story which I was in? How far, before I could change the habits that were undoing me?
Like a wild animal operating solely on instinct, I headed north from Sydney, as far as I could go, until the land ran out and that still wasn’t far enough. And then, I stepped on to a fishing boat—the Ocean Thief—and headed out into the Timor Sea. I was un-muscled, unused to physical work; I had no idea what I was in for.
But when I stepped on to the Ocean Thief and saw my first ocean sunset with that great orange disc crashing down, seabirds swooping and fluttering I understood that something new was possible. The work in those first weeks was mystifying and I was ill-prepared. I hadn’t known the way my body would shake with working, before unraveling with exhaustion.
After four weeks, the life I’d left behind seemed more alien than my new life on the rusted trawler. For the first time, I could feel my muscles, could hold tight to the metal trawling boom as it tilted on a roiling sea while tropical storms lashed at my face. Holding tight despite fear, being useful, these things were new. And so, I was new.
My months on the Ocean Thief, the months I wrote about in Fury, culminated in treachery and failure. Yet when I stepped back on to land after that wild, disastrous season, I was transformed. Stronger, yes, but more than that. I had found the beginning of the self I wanted to be, had experienced the power of elsewhere.
My life is immensely different now from the one I was in as a traumatised young woman. But that twenty-year-old self taught me the thing which sustains all elements of my life now: the power and importance of removing myself from my patterns. The power of a circuit-breaker.
When I find myself now in my writing life to be in a spiraling pattern, I know enough to stop trying. Stop trying to make it work without removing myself from the situation.
It’s not uncommon for sailors, mid-storm or in high winds, to heave to—in other words, stop trying to wrangle the sail, manage the rudder. You simply stop. Draw breath. Gather your thoughts and either wait for the wind to pass or try a different tack.
The power is in the pause.
When we are in storms, even minor ones, we can feel like we must keep fighting the elements, keep sailing, keep winning. The circuit-breaker is my not-so-secret weapon.
At its heart, the practice I’m describing is simply this: stop doing what you’re doing, draw breath, and let a different habit emerge.
If the turning up at your desk isn’t working – take a walk, have a nap (Jaclyn Moriarty has built quite the writerly thesis around the power of the nap), listen to a hypnosis app (I love Darren Marks, a British hypnotherapist who does lots of ‘inspiration and creativity’ audio apps), sit beneath a tree and breathe, take a bath…..
Rest and reset. It’s what you’re doing, now, by embarking on Immersion: Deep.
Today, pause. Let the sails loose and see what emerges.
Heave-to, me hearties, heave-to.
Your prompt for today:
A stream of light
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