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Surfing is not a hobby of mine, no. And I’m definitely not a fan of the oddball Lars von Trier film Breaking the Waves though I do appreciate its stars Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgard. But as I stared at the Atlantic Ocean this past weekend, I saw plenty of breaking waves and saw a symmetry between what I was seeing and what I am currently experiencing…creatively.
So Science Daily defines a breaking wave this way:
In physics, a breaking wave is a wave whose amplitude reaches a critical level at which some process can suddenly start to occur that causes large amounts of wave energy to be dissipated.And you’ve seen it happen at the beach as I just witnessed.
The wave rises and rises and rises and JUST AS it reaches this peak of ferocity and energy, it leaves its comfy, safe place and topples over to the great unknown below. And crashes…sometimes softly and other times, with loud recklessness, scattering into foamy, bubbly, dissipating ocean fallout.
Does that sound familiar to you? In your job? In your home life? Where you feel yourself rushing forward and forward until you simply feel there’s nowhere else to go, no holding back, you have to topple over the edge?
I watched those waves this weekend and I envied them for taking that leap. It’s a scary thought to let yourself extend as far as you can to the greatest amplitude, raise your voice to the highest decibel, and take that plunge. But you’ll never know what’s on the other side of that crest unless you allow yourself to do so.
So I sat on my lawn chair and I innocently jammed to Gotye and Guster and plenty of other awesome, eclectic and forward-thinking musicians who don’t necessarily start with the letter “G” and though I was relaxing or chillaxing as I had commanded myself to do all weekend long (not even bringing my laptop with me on the trip…gasp! For shame!), the wheels were turning in my head. And my heartbeat was tapping at a faster pace than usual. Because I realized as I head into this final month of preparing my book for publication later this fall that I am at a crest.
I know I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about work but I couldn’t help myself. Here I am ready to take another plunge again with OUR SEASONS, my next book, and this time, into yet another different mysterious pool of possibility. It would have been so much easier to just do the sequel to THE MUSE UNLOCKED or at least another contemporary romance novel. But no, I don’t make anything easy for myself. Ever.
And I don’t know what I will find on the other side of this next publication, if it will be a new road to lead to a different kind of audience or if it will lead to no audience at all. But… I feel the amplitude driving me forward and upward and the wave growing fiercely.
I think I’d better invest in a surfboard really soon. ~ Chris
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