Summer Vacation? Nope. Resting my Yang.

REST YOUR YANG. Written on a piece of paper, that phrase was meant as a prescription when it was handed over by my dear friend Jeanne. Also a brilliant massage therapist and yoga teacher, she is among the smartest people I know. I’ve seen her professionally for twenty or so years, and for all of those years I have followed her advice to the letter.

What this particular prescription meant, however, was left a bit unclear when she gave me the small slip of paper back in May. I came home and pinned it to the kitchen memo board, and there it stayed. A few people asked about it; others merely read it and moved on, and as the weeks churned on, I did less and less.

Or so I thought.

I did less and less blogging. My classes concluded for the season.

I got out in the garden a little. My thoughts wandered to what I might want to read. I altered my diet, walked, went to the gym a few more times each week. The bicycle got dusted off and spun around the neighborhood.

Every once in a while I checked my page rankings on my blog, watching them go up – down? – from failure to post, when only a few months before had been obsessed with checking them every morning and could feel my day utterly ruined if they had gone in the wrong direction. Email started to sit for days. Then weeks.

I caught up with the baby presents I needed to send. I began knitting a pair of socks.

Hmm, I thought. Am I resting my yang, or losing my way?

When I saw my massage therapist again, I reported in.

She nodded.

“Good,” she said. “That sounds good.”

My daughter and I began watching The Gilmore Girls, a TV series we had somehow missed, and literally after – sometimes during – each episode, we had things to discuss. We went together to the drive-in back when the late May nights were still cold, took blankets and pillows, and turned off the sound of a dreadful summer blockbuster and listened to classical music on the radio while superheroes smashed up the world.

I accepted more invitations, including one to a spectacular retreat in the Adirondacks.

“What are you writing?” someone asked me one evening. Apparently he did not know about the little prescription on my kitchen wall.

“Nothing.”

The next time that question was posed, I heard myself reply, “Nothing. I have nothing to say.”

Hmmm, I thought, that’s true. I don’t.

Writers worry when this happens. I know. I get a lot of email about what happens when the words don’t come.

We shouldn’t worry. We should rejoice.

It’s my opinion that the world would be a far better place if people who have nothing to say simply stopped saying anything. I’m also of the opinion that if more people stopped and thought before they spoke we’d all be better off, but I know I ask too much.

What I am sure of is that every once in a while writers need to stop typing and instead read and think, walk the dog, go to the movies and think some more. We need to refill.

We need to rest our yang, it seems.

Or so I’ve been told.