First thing in the morning, I feel a need to stay in my own little world for a while before connecting with people. I tend not to speak until after 9, or 10 am, but not from a lack of words. I let all of them fall to the page through the keys of my vintage typewriter.

I don’t know about you, but before my eyes are open, the words begin running through my mind. Usually within seconds I tell that devil to crawl back in his hole, but then my inner critic restarts the party of gloom and doom in my head. If I had a dollar for every time my inner critic discouraged me from writing, there’d be a room full of dollars. Fortunately, we can’t believe every thought and we get to choose which ones to keep.

A couple of weeks ago, I moved the typewriter out of my writing room and into the front of the house, in between windows. I couldn’t remember the last time I used this vintage prize until I was in one of my rare dusting sprees and noticed it covered with a fine layer of dust. If you ever wonder what’s important to you, or if it adds meaning to your life, just check for dust because the level of dust reveals frequency of use.

The sun rises on the back of the house, so the front of the house is dark and feels cool. I insert a piece of parchment paper and type every word that’s on my mind. One phrase leads to another and about halfway through a spark of inspiration lands on the page. The amount of words I have in those early morning hours gauge the page, so sometimes it’s a full page, while other times it’s a paragraph.

If the words are few, I leave the page to be added to the next morning, because it is good quality paper. Even if everything I typed is garbage, there’s no better feeling than jerking the paper from the grasp of the typewriter, crumbling it up in my hands and throwing it toward a wastebasket. The times it lands in the basket I feel elation that it went in as if it knows it’s place. So many of these words will never be read, but there’s a box labeled, ‘Thoughts’, for these pages to quietly nest in.

And that’s a good thing, because not every thought needs to be shared, but writing them out will open space for better thoughts. Let’s take a moment of gratitude that my ‘first thing in the morning’, words aren’t shared with anyone, but they do reside peacefully within a box of thoughts.