[Written in response to the Finding Everyday Inspiration https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ prompt for Day 9]

I have never been a great advocate of the classical division of productive time into studium, negotium and otium (study, business and leisure). Learning is as important as work, if not more so, and should continue throughout life and there is no reason whatsoever, in an ideal world, why both should not be enjoyable fulfilling experiences. I have been lucky enough always to have been able to study and work with things that I enjoy, things that I would do anyway in my leisure time. By contrast, leisure activities, such as socializing and sports, that other people find rewarding and replenishing have always been a source of great stress for me.

I recently spent a long period (over four years) working only with writing but, in the last few months, have started to go back to teaching English as a foreign language, which is my only other economically useful skill.

I feel different about teaching and about myself as a teacher after such a long break. I find, somewhat counterintuitively, that the break has given me more confidence in what I do. Far from feeling rusty, I find myself somehow more finely tuned. This is not something I can really explain.

There is a theory of learning whereby a learner ‘naturally’ moves from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to unconscious competence and finally to conscious competence. If this is true—and I imagine that the path is far bumpier in practice than these neat chiasms would suggest—the break somehow helped me to negotiate the last of these transitions so far as teaching is concerned, even though I literally did nothing during it.

There have also been breaks in my creative writing and, looking back now, they have tended to be creative ones. I produced a lot of work during the last few years I was living in England in the early 1990s but this dried up when I moved to Brazil. Over the following fallow period, however, I somehow reinvented myself as a poet and, between 2000 and 2005, produced a large amount of work very different from my earlier efforts. This would be followed by another hiatus. This time it lasted ten years. While these were in many ways the happiest and the busiest years of my life, they were not really very productive so far as writing is concerned. I felt that my career as a poet, such as it was, was over. I had produced what I was able to and that was that.

When I became seriously ill in 2012, I started looking back over my life and my work and decided that the latter at least was something important that needed preserving and set about taking steps to effect its preservation. This process would eventually lead to the creation of this blog.

Through the blog I was encouraged by other writers to start writing again and, in the course of 2015, I produced a whole book of new poems, the vast majority of which were originally written in response to prompts and requests coming from this blogging community. My style changed somewhat again, but in large measure retained the distinctive poetic voice that I have been (self-consciously or not) building up over the years.

As a result, I now feel the same way about poetry as I do about teaching. I have a calm, conscious confidence in my competence, even though (or perhaps because) I am aware that the way I work is different from that of others and obviously not to everyone’s taste.

As a teacher and a poet, at least, I am now fully comfortable in my own skin.

This path, however, is not inevitable. It is punctuated and driven by long periods of idleness, near-death experiences, and personal crises and will continue to be so until the day we draw our last breath. Much of the most important input is extrinsic, unpredictable and comes unexpectedly from other people. It is not a path that you can plan or forge for yourself.