Here is this week’s Five Minute Friday exercise.

I’ve said many times, it’s not the day, but the discipline. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Friday {the chosen date for most}, Saturday, Sunday or the middle of next week. The community responds to carve out five minutes of unscripted writing, post it, link up at our special community on Facebook at fiveminutefriday.com and encourage our writing neighbors as we visit and see their take on the common prompt.

Lately, I’ve also been sharing some of those experiences as chronicled in Five Minute Friday: A Collection of Stories Written in Five Minutes Flat. This week, I’ll share the word from Alia. I hope her words inspire you to join our writing club.

“I was a writer long before I was ever so bold as to claim that name for myself. I believed, as many do, that it was something you have to earn with book sales or a paycheck or a degree from a fancy university. But I had words coiled up inside me that would leak from my pen by lamplight that would one day be packed up in a nondescript cardboard box labeled journals and placed next to the camping equipment in the garage. I was a girl who saw a storied world, with metaphors and symbolism and words that felt like warm honey on my tongue. And when I ventured to the screen, I worried, as writers are prone to, that my words were not enough, that I might not be enough. I spent a lot of time hovering over backspace and I hit publish with shaky fingers. I feared the deafening silence and the gathering crowds with equal measure. I longed for a place to write the way I did when the journals were scribbled in and no one was going to call me out as a fraud, but I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I wanted a place where I could write too many words or too few and not worry if they were the right ones. And when I found FMF and they promised I could just come, that showing up was the battle and doing it scared was brave, I found my fingers would fly across the keys. I wrote things that made me cringe, and others that made me believe I was born for this. And I found a community that would cheer either way. I learned that writers write and the first step is showing up. I leaned to call myself a writer in those five minutes every Friday. I learned to write free.

There you go. The word this week is RUSH. The timer is set for five minutes, so let’s GO…

Rush. Rush. Rush. We rush to grow up. We rush through assignments. We get caught in the morning or evening rush. We’re constantly rushing through life … especially at this time of year.

Take a deep breath. Take another. How abut if we stop rushing and take some time to just enjoy the life we have?

Now, I am as guilty as the next person. For years, I was rushing at breakneck speed to advance in life and in career. I put family and life on hold while I rushed to the next project, the next story, the next career move. It took some personal losses — and the benefit of just plain aging and observing — to realize I had it all backwards.

Instead of rushing through life — literal life and prayer life — take time this season — especially this season — to savor the often hidden innocence and beauty of the world and circumstances we are in. Stop for a moment. Look around. Listen to the tugs of your heart. Take the time to appreciate what we have, wherever we are, … STOP

... in whatever circumstances we are in. To borrow and paraphrase a few cliches, stop and smell the roses, look for the extraordinary in the ordinary, count your blessings, and give thanks for the NOW to the Creator who has placed us here.

THOUGHT TO REMEMBER: I have a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.