I’ve been a whirlwind of fruitful work this year. It has been exhilarating and sometimes tiring but always, always worth it. I feel I’m using my gifts and I’m helping. I love my students and my days are about my favorite things: songs, stories, poems, and enchantment. What could be better?

And yet, I’ve also felt a longing for my own creative work and projects. Since I finished writing a draft of my novel way back in January, and since the flurry of poems that arrived in April, I haven’t done much sustained, deep creative work of my own. Yes, a song or a poem or an essay here and there, but not with that satisfying sense of working towards a goal, much less completion of a project which is such a source of rocket-fuel.

Yesterday I got a bit fed up with that low-level sense of dissatisfaction and asked myself what I could do about it.

I am busy, yes, as we all are, and there are many calls on my time and lots more to create for my classes and students before the end of the year. But I see that there is also time and energy and more than that – eagerness – to devote to a project, and I determined to do so.

I made a list of all my in-process projects and then asked:

Which of these projects feels the most exciting to me right now?

Which has a defined end point?

Which will give me energy as I work on it?

The answer was obvious.

And that clarity was confirmed when I found myself immediately taking steps, making lists, noodling at the piano, singing lines.

How thrilling!

This morning, I find myself IN IT – books and papers open all over the piano, the voice memo recorder on my phone pressed into service as I try out new bits of melody and interlude.

And I feel, once again, myself. My whole self!

So what I take away is this:

Choosing in a clear, definite way gives energy and permission to get into action.

Will I get to those other projects sometime? I hope so.

But for now, working on this one which is, when you think about it, the only thing you really can do at any one time, gives me energy and a spring in my step.

Once more, I’m Kate the composer, and I can hardly wait to see what else will pour out of me and what else I’ll learn as I follow this thread of eagerness.

Choosing is what sets it all in motion.

What definite choice can you make today to feel like you’re back on top, excited and eager, and truly, thrillingly yourself?