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    Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change
    Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change
    Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change
    Ebook224 pages1 hour

    Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

    By Maggie Smith

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    About this ebook

    The NATIONAL BESTSELLER from the author of YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL

    “A meditation on kindness and hope, and how to move forward through grief.” —NPR
    “A shining reminder to learn all we can from this moment, rebuilding ourselves in the darkness so that we may come out wiser, kinder, and stronger on the other side.” —The Boston Globe
    “Powerful essays on loss, endurance, and renewal.” —People

    For fans of Glennon Doyle, Cheryl Strayed, and Anne Lamott, a collection of quotes and essays on facing life’s challenges with creativity, courage, and resilience.

    When Maggie Smith, the award-winning author of the viral poem “Good Bones,” started writing inspirational daily Twitter posts in the wake of her divorce, they unexpectedly caught fire. In this deeply moving book of quotes and essays, Maggie writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation. Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, Keep Moving celebrates the beauty and strength on the other side of loss. This is a book for anyone who has gone through a difficult time and is wondering: What comes next?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9781982132088
    Author

    Maggie Smith

    Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

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    • 3/5
      A nice, short book with good intentions. I read this in one sitting and I think I probably would have enjoyed it more had I picked it up from time to time and needed a motivational pick me up.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful, inspirational statements that motivate and resonate with me. Heartfelt without ever feeling fake.

    Book preview

    Keep Moving - Maggie Smith

    1

    REVISION

    THE LONG BOOK

    When my daughter was in second grade, she struggled with anxiety at bedtime—about death in particular, but also about the future in general. I would tuck her in at night and lie with her in the dark, holding her, listening.

    When will I die? she’d ask. Will you definitely die before me because you’re older?

    What could I tell her? There are no guarantees in this life. But she was eight years old. I’d smooth her hair from her face and try my best to find the right words to calm her mind.

    Yes, I’m sure I’ll die before you—but not until I’m very old, and you’re a grown-up.

    The questions kept coming: Will we miss each other when we’re dead? Will we even know we’re dead? When will it happen? Will we feel it?

    Life is long—a long book, I told her, and you’re only on the first chapter. Who wants to ruin a book by worrying about the end the whole time? Who wants to know how a book will end?

    That would be boring, she said.

    And of course, she was right.

    Life is a book—long, if we’re lucky—and we write it as we go. The ending isn’t written, waiting for us to arrive. I’d known this all along, logically, but I hadn’t yet felt it.

    I thought that I knew my story.

    I thought that what I was living was the whole story, but it was only a chapter.

    After almost nineteen years together, my ex-husband and I separated. When my marriage ended—and with it the life I had known—the book did not end. Suddenly, there were so many blank pages, so many blank years ahead, to fill. There were days, weeks, when I could hardly get out of bed, hardly eat, but I felt the desire to write. If everything was going to fall apart, I told myself, at least I could create something. I was learning to live a different story, and I needed to find the words for it.

    I struggled to write poems during this time. When I write a poem, I don’t begin with an idea and then seek the language for it; I begin with language and follow where it leads me. But now I had ideas to work through, stories to tell, and I knew I would need a different kind of writing, a different container for my thoughts.

    One morning, I wrote a goal for myself—just a couple of sentences—and posted it on social media. The next day, I wrote another one. Since then, I have written a note-to-self—an affirmation, an encouragement, a self-directive—every day.

    The question I asked myself over and over in those first days and weeks was, What now? And that question inspired the last sentence of every goal: Keep moving. I had no idea what would happen next, what the next chapter would hold, but I had to get myself there.

    The ending of one thing is also the beginning of another. What is the next adventure? There is room enough in this life—with its many endings, its many beginnings—for things you could not have imagined last week or last year or ten years ago.

    KEEP MOVING.

    Write breathe on your to-do list. Write blink. Write sit and eat. Then cross everything off. How satisfying! Give yourself credit for living.

    KEEP MOVING.

    Remember putting on glasses for the first time: suddenly, the trees had individual leaves; the moon had defined edges. Try to see through that clear lens—everything as it is, not blurred or diffused by grief or anger. Look around you and marvel.

    KEEP MOVING.

    Stop calling your heart broken; your heart works just fine. If you are feeling—love, anger, gratitude, grief—it is because your heart is doing its work. Let it.

    KEEP MOVING.

    Focus on who you are and what you’ve built, not who you’d planned on being and what you’d expected to have. Trust that the present moment—however difficult, however different from what you’d imagined—has something to teach you.

    KEEP MOVING.

    To revise means, literally, to look at again, to re-envision. Revision has always been my favorite part of writing. I know some writers love the rush of the new idea, the getting-it-down, the honeymoon period with a story or poem when it’s still sparkling. But for me, the problem solving is what I love most: the challenge posed by the not-right words in the

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