I recently had an epiphany thanks to one of my own posts. I was reminded of this post I wrote in 2019: Understanding Why Your Creative Child is Lazy. If you’ve never read it, I think it’s one of the more important posts I’ve written and one that hardly gets read. The section about the stages of the creative process is important for parents of creative children.

I realized that part of the reason I have felt varying degrees of stuck, unmotivated, lazy, etc. for months isn’t because it was time to throw in the towel after 20 years of blogging. It was because I’ve been going through the creative process in the midst of many other life transitions.

I’m currently processing so much on top of the creative process.

• What it means to blog and work online now in the era of AI.
• What it means to have my only child approaching the end of her homeschooling years.
• What it means to have a husband who is of retirement age but not retired.
• What it means to know I have less years ahead of me than I have behind me.
• What it means to be less than perfectly prepared financially for our later years. 
• What it means when you and your husband both can feel yourself starting to slow down physically. 
• What it means to live in the midst of cultural upheaval, not knowing what lies ahead. 
• What it means to be rethinking significant parts of your theology. 

Each one of these is a big life topic. To have all of them hitting in the same year or so has been a lot to take in and process. I wouldn’t say it has left me paralyzed, but it has meant that there have been way too many variables going on at the same time to easily make decisions.

So I realized part of what I’ve been struggling with is trying to not only be engaged in the creative process but also doing that in the midst of a rapidly changing culture, a changing home situation, and more things that I didn’t include.

Anyone who knows me in real life knows I am not a lazy person. I’m just the opposite. I’m a highly-productive person. Or at least I was before I hit age 40 and then age 50. But I have struggled with focus over the past year or so which has made me unproductive. Again, there were way too many variables to weigh in each decision. I probably could have posted every day for the past year, but no one wants to read me hashing out my thinking day after day. So I would pop in from time to time and try to share a bit of what I’ve been dealing with. 

In reality, trying to make decisions that align with every aspect of life has been difficult. I wrote in Creating a Cozy Life:

A cozy life or cozy living is what I call the coming together of purposeful living, simple living, and faithful living.

• Purposeful Living – We make purposeful choices rather than going with the flow, even if it means being different from the crowd.
• Simple Living – We include only those things in our life that bring real value.
• Faithful Living – We make choices that align with our faith and core beliefs.

So cozy living is living purposefully and simply according to our deeply held beliefs.

When we choose a cozy life, we can bring peace, understanding, and joy to our home.

Trying to find that balance in my life has been challenging. Maybe part of the reason the Lord allowed this experience is so I can help others as they move through different phases of life that complicate each other. 

In any case, things finally started falling into place the past few weeks. Believe it or not, one of the key factors in seeing clearly was realizing how much AI can actually help me. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true.

As I wrote in a Gab post this morning, AI is the research assistant I could never afford.

More thoughts on Gab AI  @a 

I’m a published writer turned blogger who became a homeschooling mother. My opportunities to do any kind of in-depth writing have been much less over the past eighteen years (for obvious reasons).

What I have discovered is Gab AI is the research assistant I could never afford. Many writers have research assistants. Many authors have ghostwriters. The average writer cannot afford to hire even one part-time research assistant.

Using Arya, ChatGPT, and Grok, I can research a topic in literally 5-10 minutes that would normally take me half a day. I don’t use this kind of language often, but it really is life-changing what it makes possible.

I was discussing this with another blogger this weekend. We’re both kind of blown away with the opportunities this provides us as homeschooling mothers and bloggers with limited time.

So I found part of my answer in the very thing that was complicating my thinking. Who knew? It’s strange the way life unfolds at times. 

In the end, this was the only long-term answer that addressed the big questions. I’ve been working toward this the past few weeks, but haven’t said much. 

I am still sorting out the last details with the breaking of the site into four. But I’ve made excellent progress. I’m hoping by the end of May all four sites will be completely what I envision them to be. Some of them are much further along than the others, but it’s pretty clear what each one will be focusing on. 

For my readers here, A Quiet Simple Life | Sallie Borrink has been narrowed down to simple living, homeschooling, homemaking, parenting, gifted/2e, and general Christian faith topics. It will be the peaceful place that so many of us need. People can feel free to interact with the other websites as they choose. There will be links to each of them in the sidebar to make it easy to get to them.

Thank you for your patience as this lazy blogger worked through the creative process in the midst of everything else.