My Public Agreement With Now: A Declaration
The platform boots appeared again one morning.
The vision returned while I was writing morning pages for the first time as Julia Cameron prescribes them: three pages of automatic writing, no editing, whatever comes to the page as the hand moves.
In the middle of writing, the boots came back. The same vision from a meditation in 2023. Darkness. Then the black platform witchy boots, stepping onto a floor that becomes visible only when each step lands. The path revealing itself literally one step at a time. Everything dark. Only the checkered piece of ground under each foot visible as the boots move forward.
That is where I am right now.
A book has lived in me for decades. When asked if I would write one, I have said yes and meant it. The book lived where good intentions go when they are not yet ready to meet the demands of becoming real: later.
I kept telling myself that I would write it later. When I raised the family. When I traveled back to Maui, where the idea was born decades ago. When I finished graduate school. When I completed the certifications. When I built the platform. When I served the clients. When the business found its footing. When the season cleared.
The book I had been postponing is The Private Agreement with Later.
The irony does not escape me. The very thing I have been studying, naming, and writing about in the lives of the women I observe and the women I coach has been operating in my own life, quietly, without review. The book sat in safekeeping while I built everything around the space where it belongs. The agreement with later renewed itself each time I chose something more urgent.
Then, the morning pages broke the old agreement.
The timeliness of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way finding its way to the next title in my Audible queue, arriving precisely as I entered the terrain of writing the book, does not escape me. The exercise became available the moment the work required it.
The first tiny step I committed to was to finish the page I was writing. One step, that is all the day requires.
My inspiration lives in my house. Luna lays beside me as I write. Mocha at my feet. Egypt at the other end of the sofa. I started to write Stella’s name among them and caught myself. Stella’s ashes are on the sofa table behind me, so close that I just have to lean back and let my head touch the box, as if caressing her.
The last thing I wrote before I closed the notebook this morning: Take one step today, Neidy. The path itself reveals as you step.
The Private Agreement with Later is a named, claimed, and documented project. I purchased the domains and registered the ISBN already. The research is underway. The first published piece, Angela’s Story, is already in the world. The record of authorship grows one step at a time, and so does my commitment to the completed piece.
The final product is still my later. The work is my now. I have renegotiated the agreement, on purpose, in public, right now.
The boots are moving.
