Some Small Starting Points

I’m doing something a little self-indulgent today, writing a post that explains how I got into the three fields of writing I focus on:

1) food/nutrition/diets/hospitality

2) literary and historical backgrounds about composers and their works, with an emphasis on the texts

3) our current political situation as seen from a Christian and conservative point of view

Those three topics don’t seem to have much in common, do they? In general, I like to think that my overall purpose in whatever writing I do is to give my readers information, but then one has to ask why I’m giving out this specific information. Maybe you’ll find it interesting as you read this post to think about seemingly small events in your life that ended up shaping your own direction. Why do we do what we do? It’s worth thinking about.

As it happens, I can remember the specific instances that pushed me in these directions. (Notice that I don’t say “caused me to go in these directions.” I chose to follow them, but I needed the push. There’s a whole book on free will vs. determinism in that previous sentence, but I’ll leave that subject to others.) So, anyway, here’s how events took place:

First of all, I can remember the generating incident that led to this blog which started out as “Intentional Happiness” and then moved on to “Intentional Living” before becoming what it is today. We had moved to the Denver area in August 2009, and sometime that winter I read a review of Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project in The Denver Post. I can remember exactly how the review looked, how the title with its long subtitle (Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun) seemed to imply that this was a lightweight, funny book, and how I (of course) put it on hold at the library instead of just buying a copy. I’ve written before about how one thing led to another, with my delightedly reading it, then reading it aloud to my long-suffering husband and son during a trip that summer, then recommending it for a book group we had at our church, and then deciding to write my own book about happiness, teasing out the biblical ideas that Gretchen had in her book plus a number of my own. (Someone said to me about my book, “Well, that’s just a rehash of Gretchen Rubin’s book, isn’t it?” to which I indignantly replied, “No, it’s not. It’s my book, with my ideas and my examples and illustrations. I just used her book as a starting point.” Which was perfectly true.) Then I needed to sell the book and so set up a website, which Jim helped me do. And then, in September 2014 I wrote my first actual “happiness” post, on “The Small Things You Do Every Day . . . “ about deadheading my four o’clocks. (I just spent some totally useless time trying to get the formatting to behave on it, as it was transferred from another platform, and finally decided to just let it go.)

As the years rolled by I got less and less interested in writing about overall everyday happiness and more and more involved in thinking and writing about food. Finally, last fall, we redid the site’s header and colors, and I completely switched over to an all-food-focused blog, but not, as I always say, a food blog. Now I’m moving forward with ideas on eating in general and also on entertaining. The website still has a long way to go as I get it aligned with this new interest, but we’re on the way. It’s fair to say, though, that had I never read Gretchen Rubin’s book and gotten the idea of writing my own, and had I then not needed to publicize said book, I probably would never have started the blog—and it has become a huge part of my life. (Not that I have a huge following, you understand, but I do enjoy writing it.) Since the website was in place in the spring and summer of 2014, I used it as a launchpad for posts about my son’s cancer and his recovery, so that thankfully-in-the-past stretch of our lives played a part, too. The moment when I clicked on “publish” for that first post about Gideon’s illness I fell in love with blogging, and I’ve never fallen out.

The point is, I can pinpoint that tiny event—my noticing the review of THP and putting the book on hold at the library—as the beginning of a whole new area of my life. The same is true of the second item I mentioned, writing about music. It all stemmed from Jim’s and my attendance at a Christmas concert by the Cherry Creek Chorale. I sat there listening to them and thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s any way I could sing with this group.’ They were so wonderful! I had had a short but unhappy tenure with another choral group in the area, but I missed singing. So at some point I looked the group up online and saw that they would be holding auditions in August. ‘What do I have to lose?’ I remember thinking. ‘If I get in that’ll be great, and if I don’t then we’ll just keep going to their concerts.’ The stakes were very low, I thought. So I signed up to come in, and I got in. And now, almost seven years later, the Chorale is my part-time (unpaid) job. Not only do I write posts about the music we’re singing, I’m in charge of ten big food-related events a year. All because of that August evening when I got in the car and drove over to Bethany Lutheran Church to try out.

As for the third big part of my life, my interest in American politics, I’ll just say that the day in May 2016 that I typed the words “conservatives against Trump” into the Google search bar marked my entrance into a whole new world. Here we are almost three years later and I’m still posting articles about the mess we’s in. I’ll just leave it at that.

So I hope you’ll be inspired by this post to think back on your life to see your own starting points. How did you get where you are today? Is it where you want to be? Do you need to make some kind of course correction? As I noted earlier, the direction of my original blog about happiness has changed significantly. I sat down this past summer to write a post about our trip to France and realized, ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’ I had lost my desire to chronicle my daily life and my little observations; I wanted to write about food, but specifically about the place food should have in our lives. So I did some redirecting. The initial impetus that got me started, though, was what I needed at the time.

Always easier to steer a moving vehicle!

Would you like for me to speak to your group in the Denver metro area? Contact me at [email protected].