Do you have a lengthy writing project you always thought you would undertake? COVID days that seem to melt away, one by one, into nothing very much? Consider the Long Haul Project. Might this not be just the time to get it done?
Yet it can seem discouraging even to contemplate taking on something big. As writer Amy Shearn has put it: “Why on earth would a person take on an ambitious, sprawling, impossibly time-consuming project that may well, by its very definition and scope, never reach completion?”
For me, the answer is in her interview with Tommy Caldwell, soon after he had free-climbed the Dawn Wall of El Capitan. He said, ‘I loved the way it made me live. You know, to have this goal, to be training, to be climbing every day, to feel so focused.’
The narrow focus, daily practice and open-endedness of the Long Haul Project may be just what your being craves right now. What may be worth it is the way it makes you live.