Keeping the clock wound.
BY SARAH ANNE HAYES
Sarah Anne Hayes is a believer, writer, and unabashed bibliophile. She spends her days running her small business, planning out her next adventure, belting out show tunes, and hanging out with her incredible fiancé. Sarah believes life is a gift meant to be celebrated, Tuesday morning should be as memorable as Saturday night, and nothing boosts your confidence like the perfect red lipstick.
1,766.
That is the number of days, as of writing, I have journaled… without stopping.
It began as a competition with myself. I’ve been journaling fairly consistently since 1999 and had seasons where I’ve journaled every day.
On January 1, 2015, I wondered if I could journal every day for a year. On January 1, 2016, I wondered if I could journal every day for two years. And, well, by January 1, 2017, the question became, “How long can I keep this up?”
So here I am, 1,766+ days later, still going, putting pen to paper for at least a few minutes every single day.
It might seem like a small thing — daily journaling.
At this point, it’s so ingrained into the rhythm and routine of my day that it would feel weird going to bed without having done it. It is the key to closing out my day, taking a few minutes to stop, breathe, and process through the chaos, beauty, or both.
However, there was a time, early in 2015, when it wasn’t ingrained in my day. When I had to choose to keep going, choose to put off sleep for another 10 or 15 minutes in order to put pen to paper and hold fast to the commitment I made to myself.
Discipline isn’t really a word we like to hear.
It might bring back terrible memories of time-outs from your parents or struggling through things you really don’t like doing. Discipline is rarely fun, and it definitely isn’t sexy, especially in the small things.
As its meaning suggests, it is often hard and painful and the last thing we want to do.
Yet discipline often results in wonderful, marvelous things.
Like many words, discipline has both a noun and verb form. One of the synonyms for the noun is specialty, a word we often use when referring to a person who chooses a field, studies it, works hard, and (usually) succeeds.
We praise those people for the things they accomplish yet shrug off the power discipline has to change things when employed in our own lives because it takes effort and, well, it isn’t glamorous or Instagrammable. The result might be, but the work to get there certainly isn’t.
In her book on the intersection between faith and creativity, Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle shares the story of a town where the only clockmaker died, leaving no family or apprentices. For years, no one in the town had the ability to fix clocks or watches, so many broke down or became faulty, gaining or losing time, and thus losing their usefulness.
One day, a famed clockmaker and repairer came to town and everyone brought their broken watches and clocks to him, hoping he could make them run again. In the end, the only ones the watchmaker was able to fix were the ones their owners had kept wound through the years, “because they were the only ones which would be able to remember how to keep time.”
L’Engle goes on to say this:
“So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain. We may not always be able to make our ‘clock’ run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound so that it will not forget.”
Showing up isn’t always easy. It isn’t always fun. It’s rarely beautiful or sexy or anything we want to share with the world. Especially when we are tired and worn down, when something unexpected in life has knocked us off our feet, when, for all our effort, it feels like our “clock” is ringing off midnight when it’s actually three in the afternoon.
In those seasons where we feel drained or burnt out, when life feels heavy and hard, often the last thing we want to do is choose discipline — to still get up at 6am, to still spend 10 minutes on the yoga mat, to still take that morning walk, to still prepare the meals and eat the nutritious food, to still write the words or do the scales or play the song or study the material.
It is in those seasons that discipline in the small things becomes all the more necessary. It may take time for us to get out of them.
It may take years for the clockmaker to return to town, as it were, but it’s only by keeping the clock wound, by committing to discipline in the small things, that our ‘clock’ will remember how to keep time and be able to run properly when things are made right again.
Sarah Beth, of the popular YouTube channel SarahBethYoga, often puts it this way, “Your daily practice is your strongest practice.”
In other words, big, grand efforts may have their place, but the most growth, the most change, comes from the quiet simplicity of daily discipline, from the commitment to keep your clock wound so you remember how to keep time, in the seasons when it’s working properly and in the seasons when it’s not.