Bumping Along toward Dreams

by Kayce Stevens Hughlett

“Write a scene that involves bumps. Write for at least 10 minutes. Write by hand, in your notebook.” Sarah Selecky

With notebook and pen ready, my buzzy brain reaches its tendrils into the space that connects with my hand and out comes: Bumps? Are you kidding me?

Bumps in the road. Life. My life. Yours. We all hit bumps and roadblocks, yet here I sit with a single prompt and a blank page and all I can think of inside my swirling cranium is this: We are infinite.

Infinite possibility. Infinite connection. Infinite beauty. Infinite life.  Not infinite bumps.

Yes, they show up in the road just like the crows raising hell outside my window at 4:45 a.m. It’s a bump, not the end of the world. I can turn the negative wake-up call into a positive instead of fighting it. It's my choice. After all, I’ve already meditated and read some inspirational quotes. I’m writing and it’s not even 6:00 a.m. It feels pretty good.

Bumps. Rash bumps. Goose bumps. Truth bumps. Mumps bumps. Road bumps. Camel humps. Rise. Fall. Recede. Bumps that feel monumental in the moment. You know the kind, right? Like sitting down to write the first word of a story or a personal letter or making that dreaded phone call or walking into a new class or joining a scary adventure.

It's weird to admit, but I actually kind of love bumps. They can be a sweet surprise, because you can’t see what’s on the other side. Step by step, we climb to the rise in anticipation. Like Sacre Coeur in Paris or Phinney Ridge in my neighborhood, the only way to get to the spectacular view is up and over, one bump or step at a time.

What if you wrote for 10 minutes on bumps? What might you discover? Perhaps you’d find your infinite beauty in a spectacular view? Or learn that all you need to do is start. Maybe you could ride the bumps up and down with a little less grumbling. Give it a try. Allow yourself to bump along. It might be kind of fun!

On November 1, 2012, I took on the challenge of National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo). Thirty days later, one word at a time, I completed the 50,000+ word first draft of Blue: a novel. After many bumps in the road, Blue will be published on September 10, 2015! Dreams really do come true. See what can happen when you keep bumping along? (Cheesy, I know, but sometimes I just can't help myself!) 

What’s your dream? Will you take one small step toward it today?