That was as far as I got before I had to leave for Atlanta to visit and help my parents. On the way back, I wanted some good music and was flipping through my Spotify playlists and came across one I made from Lindsey Mead’s blog. I pushed random and as I began to sing at the top of my lungs, I thought–music, it’s been 24 days and I haven’t mentioned music.

Here’s the song I listened to over and over again for the last thirty minutes of my drive home. By The Head and the Heart–Lost in My Mind…

~

 365 true things about me

Today, please welcome writer Lindsey Mead.

I wake up before my alarm, as I almost always do. It’s 5:27. I creep quietly to the closet so as not to wake Matt and get dressed in running clothes by the light of my iPhone. I brush my teeth and head out for my run, bundled against the January cold.

It’s pitch dark and the moon is still visible in the sky, heavy, almost full. These are the darkest mornings, and the sky has only just begun to lighten when I arrive home after four miles. I walk to the kitchen, catching my breath, the smell of coffee filling the house. We always set the coffee maker the night before, and that first cup in the morning remains one of the truest joys in my life.

Everybody is still sleeping as I walk to the third floor to my office. I sit at my desk in the quiet for about half an hour, reading my email and the morning’s blogs. Outside my window, light bleeds into the sky. This hour is often my favorite of the day. I feel as though I am the only person in the world.

At 6:50, the day begins for real. I wake up Grace and Whit with the same whispered question every morning: did you have sweet dreams? As they dress I take a quick shower. After breakfast and the January rigmarole of coats-hats-mittens-boots we leave for school, which is only a mile away. I’m home from dropping them off before 8:00. I pour myself another cup of coffee and walk back upstairs. There are two computers on my desk, one for work and one for writing. The writing one is always open and on. Now I turn on the work one too.

The morning dissolves into a frenzy of phone interviews, conference calls with clients, and responding to more emails than I can count. Though busy, it’s one of my favorite kinds of workdays: no meetings outside of the house. I am in jeans and slippers all day, and in between phone calls I do a load of laundry and make a pot of homemade chicken noodle soup for dinner.

My calendar has one open hour from 1:00 to 2:00, and all morning I climb towards it like a hiker on a slow trek to a visible summit. At 12:59 I click all the windows closed on my work computer and turn to my Mac. I turn on Freedom. Thirty minutes. I lean back in my chair and look out the window at my tree, which is so constant a part of every day as to be an actual character in my life. And then I open the essay I’m working on, and I begin to write.

After thirty minutes Freedom dings off, and I quickly glance through my work email, walk downstairs for a glass of water, and return to my desk. And then, twenty more minutes of Freedom. These are less fluid minutes. I keep writing and erasing the same sentence. I look up at the Wendell Berry poem that hangs above my desk:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Not for the first time, I think: I really hope he’s right.

At 2:00 I am fired out of a cannon again as my “day job” resumes. The afternoon is a blur similar to the morning. Around 4:45 I watch the sunset flame at the horizon out my window, noticing that the days are longer now than even a few weeks ago. Just like almost every day, I open the window, lean out, and take a picture of the orange and pink sky.

Just before 6:00 I turn off my work computer and the babysitter leaves. Grace tells me about her teacher’s comments on her book report rough draft. I quiz Whit on his multiplication tables. Wearing his navy blue constellation-print pajamas, he curls up next to me on the couch to listen to some Harry Potter.

By 7:30 they are both in their beds, reading. I climb into my own bed and open my laptop. I review the blog posts I have lined up for the week ahead, tweaking and editing, catch typos and errors, adding links. At 7:45, I kiss Whit goodnight, listen to his prayers, and do the Ghostie Dance (to keep the ghosts away). Then, back to the blog. At 8:15, it’s good night to Grace. I spend a few more minutes editing my blog and then I shut my computer and open Glitter and Glue, Kelly Corrigan’s new memoir. I read until 9:45, underlining and taking notes in the margins for my review, and then I turn out the light.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Someone by Alice McDermott. Several of my most trusted reader friends recommended it, and they were not wrong. What a powerful, beautiful book: I was amazed at McDermott’s ability to show how much poetry there is in the most mundane, ordinary life.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Pay attention. When one is looking and listening closely, there is an absolutely endless source of inspiration, wonder, and humor available in this world.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• My favorite place to read and to write is in my bed, so very often that’s where you can find me. I don’t know if this is that strange, but it’s definitely something I get teased about!

Where you can find Lindsey Mead:

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

February 1, 2014: Lindsey Mead

Lindsey Mead writes about her struggle to be as present as she can in her life where she is a writer and a headhunter, a mother and a wife, a friend and a sister.  She writes to find “a coherent sense of self in all of these splintered identities.” And this desire to make sense of the different selves that we are is a big part of the reason I love reading Lindsey’s words. An equally big part is that Lindsey is struggling to tell the truth. She is right there on the page. Her words are real. Her blog posts matter.

In a post I wrote back in 2010 about the places that call us back, I quoted from one of Lindsey’s posts: the spaces that hold our memories.

Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a place that hosted an important moment in my life, I can feel that moment, hovering, bumping into me, invisible to the eye but not to the spirit.

In honor of Lindsey’s honesty, I would like to say here now that I struggle with getting older in the sense that it seems impossible that so many years have passed. For that reason, I love this post: This is Thirty-Eight.

Thirty eight is thirteen years of marriage. It is knowing all the ways that marriage is both less and more than I thought it was, when I walked into a church wearing white and hearing thunder. Less score-keeping, less candlelight, less drama. More small acts of kindness, more forgiveness, more abiding. Fewer flowers, but more cups of coffee made exactly how I like them, without being asked, brought to me in bed in the morning.

Perhaps, starting on my birthday this year, I will follow Lindsey’s lead and write my own “this is” post as a way to work toward coming to terms with the number of years already behind me.

Lindsey and I share a love of the writing of Ellen Gilchrist and Dani Shapiro. Lots of overlap in our reading. A love of poetry. A love of our years at summer camp. I feel the same unease she feels, although mine comes from a different place. 

She describes her blog, A Design So Vast, where she’s been writing since 2006, as “one woman’s journey to right now.” The name of the blog comes from Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace):

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

Many of her blog posts are republished at The Huffington Post, like this book review of Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing or this essay 10 Things I Want My Daughter to Know Before She Turns 10.

Lindsey graduated from Princeton with a degree in English. She has her MBA from Harvard. In addition to The Huffington Post, her writing has been published in four anthologies, as well as in Brain, Child, Mamapedia, and Literary Mama,  She once described this series on how writers spend their days as a “wonderful look at someone doing their heart’s work.” Come back in just a few precious days to take a look at how Lindsey Mead does her heart’s work.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how LINDSEY MEAD spends her days.