25/100: The End of the Beginning
This article looks at Day 25 in a series of 100 visits detailing what happens at my local library
If this series were a relay race, the first runner would pass the baton to the second today. The pace has been set as we head into the middle phase.
A four-person race is something of an awkward analogy for a writing project with the standard three components of beginning, middle, and end. A trilogy might be a more appropriate comparison, and this is what I would have used if I believed the units were equally distributed, but I don’t.
Middle things tend to get a bad rap: middle age, middle children, middle school, middle of the road. None of these are revered as the stuff of envy; instead they are framed as realities that we must accept or get past or else be doomed to get stuck in. The middle is what comes after the honeymoon and before the golden years. In the context of writing, it’s the slog; neither as exciting as the beginning nor as dramatic as the end. In the context of reading, it’s the part to skip over. It’s also the longest.
In the earliest days of this series, I’d often wonder what on earth had possessed me to sign up for a 100-day commitment, and how on earth I was going to see it through. I still wonder these things, but I’ve become more comfortable with all of it. Not just with the writing, but the experience of going to the library each day with no sense of direction. I have gotten to know the work better and gained a firmer understanding of what it is I’m trying to do with this project.
I’ve also come across some obstacles. Monotony of happenings, observations on social behavior that contradict each other. At the beginning of things, there is no clutter. Everything is fresh, and stands alone just as it is. As time goes by and experiences pile up, lessons get learned and connections get made and baggage gets collected — but so does wisdom. In the beginning, you always try to make sense of everything. Once you reach the middle, you start to understand that not everything will always make sense.
Twenty-five days in, my trips to the library have become part of my daily routine. They aren’t shiny and new and sprightly the way they were in their first days. Yet there’s comfort in the rhythm of it. Perhaps I’ll be tempted by a dalliance with the unfamiliar as the series matures, creeps towards old age. Maybe I’ll embark on a journey to new library lands, à la Eat Pray Love. Or lift from The Goon Squad and try some experimental formatting. Or whatever else the writing equivalent of buying a motorcycle is.
Or maybe I won’t do any of this. It’s impossible to predict how the middle will unfold. Maybe sensationally juicy stories will play out daily for the next 8 weeks, evading the dreaded monotony that we’re taught to anticipate in the inescapable reality of the middle. Maybe the clutter that weighs down the middle can be put to use — maybe it can serve as a reminder that no one and nothing else is bound by this concept of the middle except the series itself. That beyond the vacuum wherein it lives, everything is going to go on just the same as it ever was, and it’s up to the series to keep writing the story.
Thanks for reading! Read the series from the beginning here:
