Lately, I have felt it has been a little harder to find inspiration to write. It’s a big contrast to the first month, when I had a long backlog of topics I wanted to share, built on a year or two of reading and chasing whatever caught my attention. The posts almost wrote themselves, because the material was already there, waiting.

This period of felt drought in inspiration had me thinking about where the urge to write actually comes from, and how to find it again.

It didn’t take me long to land on a post about the etymology of the word inspire. It comes from the Latin inspirare, literally “to breathe into.” In its early usage, the meaning settled into something more bodily: to draw air into the lungs.

What has been true lately is that work has really taken my thoughts and my energy, and the blog has asked me to produce rather than take in. The feeling in my body is that right now, everything is an exhale. I have been breathing out for weeks, and no wonder my lungs are running empty. Forming new ideas, noticing connections, none of that happens on its own when you are out of air.

Some say one should schedule the intake. Block time to read, be deliberate about it. I tried, but I didn’t feel as good about it as I used to; it felt like the joy was gone. The absence of joy told me something; I had turned the in-breath into one more exhale.

This situation makes me wonder if I have had this backwards this whole week. I have been treating the silent week as a failure, a gap in the consistency I was proud of. But you cannot only breathe out all the time. The pause is not the opposite of the writing. It is the part that makes the next writing possible. Just as you can’t control breathing over time, you can’t control when inspiration will hit you.