The essential slog | Daybreak Notes #207 | June 21, 2021
To create any new path, you have to go through the slog first.
Good morning, dear!
I hope this note finds you well rested, peeking ahead at a Monday and feeling hopeful.
I had a realization this week that anything we want to do — especially regularly, steadily, with the speed and focus that accompanies clarity — requires a slog first. (I know that doesn’t sound hopeful. Just wait. I think it is.)
When we haven’t done something before — cooked with a new food, worked with a new computer program, hiked a new forest, started a new fitness habit — you don’t have a path yet. You have to lay the path.
It sounds simple. Say, for example, garlic scapes! Here they are, on my kitchen counter, from a farm near me, looking fresh and green and unfamiliar. I’ve used them before, many years ago, but I can’t remember how. When I examine these thin green curly lines, I only see question marks. What do I do with them? How do I cook them? Do I cook them? Where can they go in the meals up ahead? (Ditto on daikon radishes.)
This fog is why, for the past two weeks, much of our CSA share has taken a nice 7-day stay in our fridge, and then left for the compost bin. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you that. I thought I should just know what to do, that a bolt of inspiration would strike me and illuminate the path ahead.
No, no, and nope. You have to create the path. You have to slog first. Slog, in this case, would have meant reading about garlic scapes (apparently they are the stems that grow out of the tops of garlic!), learning the various ways you can eat them (any way you eat green onions), trying a recipe, trying another recipe, trying a third recipe, experimenting with adding them to, oh, an omelet or a salad — until the path became clear. Until the fog dissipated.
Once you have a path, it is easier the next time. Once you have traversed the path a dozen times, the sightline is clear.
The slog comes first.
Laying any truly new path (new to you) is mucky. You have to wade through the uncertainty, make a wrong turn before you make the right one, push away the misunderstandings, assumptions, confusion. You have to hack the path and make it yours. And with time, the path becomes easy — it becomes clear — it becomes fast.
The path is a metaphor. It is also a concrete set of steps: this, then that, then that. And it is a very real line of cells in your brain. You are creating a new neural path. As you do a new thing over and over and over again, it becomes easier, faster, simpler — you move into autopilot.
The path forms — it is coded into your body.
For several years, I’ve tried to adopt the habit of writing every day. I want to be writing more. I want to be writing books. I want to sharpen my craft. And yet, I couldn’t seem to get in a rhythm. I was in the slog.
Then, earlier this year, I joined a workshop on creative practice, with hundreds of other writers, poets, artists, photographers, designers, screenwriters. And we started each clearing our own path. And seeing others do it, too — slogging through to build a new habit, to figure out their format, to set aside the time — made it easier to understand that the slog is a process. Not a special process. An ordinary process. An essential process.
As I reread this again, I started wondering if there was a more scientific term for the “slog.” Adopting a new habit or gaining a new skill — they all require this slog.
And then it dawned on me:
The slog is simply learning.
We adults forget sometimes the tedious necessary nature of learning. (Or is it just me?) We haven’t done calculus in years (most of us) or conjugated French verbs in decades. We haven’t sat with a difficult clarinet fingering and tried it again and again and again.
But still, there are things left to do. We are in Grade 35th, often independent study, creating our own major as we go.
Wherever we want to go next, we need new paths.
It will feel like a slog at the beginning. That’s OK. That’s how we do new things. That’s how we do hard things. That’s how we learn. Keep going! It will get faster. It will get easier.
Don’t let the slog stop you. Rather than a signal to stop, the slog is a signal that you are in a new and promising place. And through the slog, it will get easier, clearer, and faster.
With love,
Brianne