I've been made aware by the lack of fulfillment I've felt lately that the fullness of life has distracted me from keeping my habit of writing these installments. If that last sentence reads kind of long it's because I'm trying to eliminate the word “busy” from my vocabulary. I've leaned into "fullness of life" because it feels opportunistic – and in the midst of life being full, I've felt disconnected from The Newsletter. After sitting with myself and considering what options I had to reignite my drive for writing, I realized that I had allowed myself to be distracted from staying acutely aware of topics that I felt were pertinent to The Newsletter. It was in that moment, that I realized my thinking was flawed – not everything is not about constant insight.

To this day, The Newsletter is still my favorite project to date… It never fails to leave me wanting more from myself, creatively, mentally, and often times emotionally. And without beating a dead horse and asking the never truly answered question, "why do the things we love the most always go first when life gets busy?," I'm writing this installment for myself, to get another rep in, and remind myself that more often than not, repetition is the key to fulfillment in almost any area.

I don't have to have anything to say, although people will almost always prove that statement wrong, because we always have something say if we sit and think long enough about the troubles of life, the mundane, the culture, or the frustration with our output. But in the end, having something to say is not the key to creating something of value, repetition is. Tedious repetition. The kind where you wonder if you're even moving the needle anymore.

With every doubt that the needle is being moved, even just a hair closer to what you want to get out of something, a landslide of progress is made behind the scenes. And the responsibility of someone determined to create something of value is to honor the dull moments with the same respect that was given to the electric moments when you first began.

To give a disclaimer, I’m not one to preach “quantity over quality" in any way, in fact I think I’m quite the opposite. What I am saying, is that we've grown far too comfortable with instant gratification, immediate progress, and procedural creation. We’ve lost the patience required for valuable results. I don't believe that true value is created with systems and acting when inspiration forces pen to paper – but rather when discipline takes the wheel and we allow ourselves to slow down for the sake of just maintaining what we started.

Writing installments to The Newsletter has taught me many things, and one thing it continues to teach me every time I set aside time to continue, or re-introduce the habit of "just doing it" is that there are no mistakes when the art itself is just simply...consistency.