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I turned the page of a used paperback to find a miniature brochure stuck between the pages. It was not much bigger than a Post-it note and boasted of a Speed Cleaning Guide, Compliments of Real Simple. In eagerness to improve all areas of my life, I read it quickly and learned that I could swoosh, wipe, squeegee, spray, and straighten my whole house in nineteen minutes.
By the time I finished speed-reading the brochure, persuasive words had almost convinced me that I could accomplish such a feat, but before jumping on the house cleaning bandwagon, only to risk tumbling off and hitting the ground, I conceded that I could no more clean my house in nineteen minutes than I could write a chapter in nineteen minues.
I pictured Martha Stewart, the queen of domesticity, running circles around me, and Danielle Steel, the bestselling author, spewing pages of a manuscript out of a typewriter, like a geyser spews water and steam. Then I looked around me. Dust on the windowsill made me sigh, and words not yet written piled up in my head higher than the sheets and towels in my laundry basket. What to do?
"Be not dismayed," I told myself.
In both instances, I will keep trying, because every house is cleaned one sweep at a time, and every book is written one word at a time.
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