KN Magazine: Articles
THE FIRST MOMENTUM
In “The First Momentum,” Clay Stafford reflects on the subtle but powerful moment when effort begins to shape direction. What starts as a small, almost unnoticed impulse grows into a force that builds confidence, discipline, and forward motion—revealing how even the simplest actions can spark lasting change.
The first time effort changed my world, I felt it before I understood it. It wasn’t a dramatic moment; it was an impulse. We had few neighbors during my boyhood, but as I walked down the road, I saw wild onions growing in their yards. Someone had mowed their spring grass, and the scent of onions was strong. The night before, my mother had cooked beef liver and onions for dinner, which was one of my favorite childhood dishes. Something aligned in my four-year-old mind. We planted onions in our garden, but the onions in the neighbors’ yards required almost no effort at all. Everyone I knew cooked with onions. I saw an opportunity and walked up the Ledford’s driveway. “One cent for five freshly dug, spring onions,” I offered. I didn’t realize the offer was accepted not because they wanted the onions, but because they wanted them gone from their yards. Regardless, I made my first sale. I went home, got a mattock, dug all the onions from the yard, and made a small pile of change. I offered my services to other neighbors.
It all happened quietly in a private corner of my mind, where work first intersected my imagination without witnesses. Even at this age, I wanted to leave my childhood behind and escape for many reasons. Selling wild onions to neighbors from whom I picked them, essentially selling something that was already theirs, caused a shift inside me. A small inner hinge turned, and a life that had once felt mostly imaginary (getting out) started to seem possible for the first time.
Before that moment, effort mainly meant doing what I was told: chores for my parents, helping both sets of grandparents with their farms, working alongside my father as a mason’s assistant, and managing projects when assigned. But with onions, I became self-directed at a very young age. It came from listening to adults talk, especially my father, that if I worked hard, I would achieve what I wanted. Before walking up the Ledford’s driveway, this advice, ingrained from such an early age, felt unfamiliar to my experience. I understood the words, but they didn’t truly resonate with me until I perhaps sensed a hint of opportunity in the smell of fresh-mowed grass.
I had dreams before then, of course. I’d stand between the ties of the L&N railroad tracks and look one way and then the other, knowing that there had to be something at the end of each direction. I dreamed of finding what was at the end of them, like that pot of gold hidden at the bottom of rainbows that my Grandmother Stafford told me about. These were carefree childhood dreams, the kind without experience, simple dreams, the kind that come before the realization that dreams will eventually face obstacles. As a child, I was Superman. I did not yet know my kryptonite. At that age, it’s easy to imagine many futures, even conflicting ones, like a boy imagining a distant city. I had never been to a large city, though I had seen Chattanooga, and that was enough to imagine one. But as I gazed north and south along the tracks, it seemed unlikely that the futures my small, inexperienced mind envisioned could be reached by walking there. It would require the jets I sometimes watched fly overhead.
At that age, I truly had no understanding of how the world worked. Effort felt abstract then, something distant from my everyday life. The outside world seemed vast and complicated as I tried to understand it by looking at pictures from my mother’s National Geographic subscription. Whatever movement or life existed inside it seemed to belong mostly to other people: older individuals, those who knew what they wanted, my older brothers, people who seemed to know things I didn’t and couldn’t grasp. Then, almost by accident, I did something on impulse: I went door to door with a mattock, selling people their own wild onions. Part of me felt I was pulling a fast one on the neighbors, not realizing they were doing the same thing, but I approached this new venture with a seriousness I hadn’t felt before until the wild onions went back into summer hibernation. I know it made me want more, but wild onions only grew so fast, so a second understanding began to develop: patience. Selling wild onions meant returning to the effort more than once, checking the yards to see how fast the onions were growing. This required a stubbornness that even surprised me, even as I felt it taking hold. I didn’t tell my parents what I was doing, nor did I let them see the money I earned. This was mine: my idea and my rewards.
When I was six, something important happened. I had been secretly saving my money in a Mason jar hidden beneath the debris in my closet to prevent anyone in the family from stealing it. My grandfather Parker, Papa, must have known (I guessed the neighbors had talked about what that Stafford kid was doing), and when he appeared, he offered to sell me his eighty-acre farm if I had $10 to buy it. I eagerly accepted, and I now owned a farm, much to the anger of my father and one of my brothers, who believed the farm should have gone to them. This opened a new door. With more money I saved from wild onions and selling vegetables to neighbors from my family’s large gardens, I began buying cattle, then poultry, and then selling cows, poultry, and eggs. I even started breeding and selling mice wholesale to pet stores. The work I started on impulse (selling wild onions) began to open up more opportunities. For a long time afterward, I looked back almost suspiciously at how strange it seemed that a boy like me should own a farm, make money, and plan his own escape.
Although I couldn’t name or verbalize the idea, I realized that my world wasn’t moving randomly. It moved because I kept putting in effort. I understood it not intellectually but physically, the way a body learns something before the mind does.
Once that understanding arrived, even in its smallest form, it changed the atmosphere of everything around me. I got involved in small businesses, using the money I had to generate more money. I opened a bank account by the time I was eight and moved money from my Mason jar to a safer place where it earned the most interest. By fourteen, I started my own production company, which I even registered as a DBA with the state of Tennessee. I didn’t realize it then, but it would change the course of my life and open the door for the escape I had hoped for so long. The world didn’t seem easier through all of this; it felt more demanding, but it was a demand I welcomed. Most importantly, life and effort no longer felt indifferent. My father was right: if I worked hard, the things I wanted would come.
There is a current beneath everything that effort seems to touch. It felt intoxicating to me in a way I didn’t yet recognize, but I sensed the addiction and the rush. Effort carried the promise of movement: the gap between imagination and reality might not be as wide as I thought. I began noticing what effort could do in everything around me. I saw it in the quiet persistence of people working long after anyone was watching. I saw it in the small improvements from consistently returning to the same unfinished task. I saw it in the steady accumulation of results that, from the outside, looked like sudden success. But nothing was truly sudden. Patience played a role once again. Yet what stayed with me most was that initial feeling of discovery: if you knocked on the door, people would buy their own onions. Effort created something, even as simple as a knock and an offer. It wasn’t luck. It had nothing to do with timing. It only existed in the realm of self-chosen and self-directed effort.
I still didn’t realize how complicated the truth would become later in life. I hadn’t yet understood how often my future efforts would face resistance or how many things the world would refuse to move, no matter how patiently I pushed. In my young Appalachian life, things moved more simply and slowly than what would eventually come. But I knew one thing, and I would never forget it: selling onions changed my life. Work could change things, and because I had felt that even in its simplest, smallest form, I could never forget it. Early effort shaped the way I approached everything afterward. Not exactly with confidence; confidence would come much later, but with quiet curiosity about what might happen if effort was applied again, and then again.
Effort as an adult can be unpredictable. Sometimes it yields nothing, and the world remains exactly the same. But at times, in those precious moments, things change. A little progress here, a small breakthrough there, a quick “yes” when it’s most needed, a faint sense that movement has begun where there was once only stillness or even stagnation. Looking back now, I see that what started on the day I walked up the Ledford’s driveway wasn’t success; it was momentum. It was the subtle pull forward that appears when effort and possibility first meet. There was no certainty or clear direction. It simply came as an impulse: the feeling and belief that once motion begins, it can create something new, and perhaps even keep offering its own kind of blessings in response to the effort I put in. That was enough. Once I sensed the world responding to my effort, even once, like when I pulled those first pungent wild onions from the Ledford’s front yard, I would never again believe that standing still was all the world knew how to do.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
THE QUIETNESS BENEATH THE STRIVING
In “The Quietness Beneath the Striving,” Clay Stafford reflects on a life driven by constant motion and ambition, only to discover a profound shift when the striving finally quiets. In that stillness, he confronts the deeper question of identity—who we are without the chase—and explores the peace, clarity, and self-understanding that emerge when we stop pushing and simply listen.
In that quiet moment, I realized I was no longer striving. For most of my life, I chased something I could never quite name. I moved against the ticking of an internal clock only I could hear, always aware that time kept moving forward.
No actual Big Ben was telling the time, but I felt its presence in how I approached work, opportunities, relationships, meals, sleep, and even the ordinary moments of each day. My life carried a quiet urgency that fueled my ambition. I rose early, pushed forward with determination, pursued the next project, the next mountain to climb, the next room, the next possibility, hoping it meant I was moving in the right direction. Movement was always necessary. Ambition was desired. Action was virtuous. I questioned none of these. Movement, always, justified itself.
Although I always felt overwhelmed and behind, those outside my mind admired my life and career, often complimenting me on how much I had achieved with so little sleep. I worked hard. I built things. I wrote. I traveled, spoke, taught, and organized. My days were packed, seven days a week, driven by what I saw as purpose, and I rarely questioned purpose when it showed measurable results. Invitations came. Opportunities followed. Doors opened. I moved through them all with the confidence of someone who has long believed that forward momentum is the key to a well-lived life.
A ghost haunted me. No matter how much I searched within myself, I couldn’t see it clearly, but there were many small, hollow, and lonely moments when I sensed something hidden just beneath my movements. I couldn’t quite grasp it and mistook it for guilt for not working harder. I walked the hotel hallways late at night, stared at the stars after a long day of writing or directing, and always, there was a lingering vibration inside me, something unsettled. My days went well, but it was the quiet of the night that seemed to condemn me. I searched for the source of that restlessness but could not name it. How could I feel so empty when the day had gone so well?
Caring and striving were like twin threads woven together in my mind. I grew up in and intentionally stepped away from circumstances where effort wasn’t optional if you wanted to escape a room with no doors or windows. If something mattered or freedom was vital, I approached it with intensity. “How would you describe me?” I would ask my friends when we sat around reminiscing about our day. “Intense” was the word most often used when describing me. And why shouldn’t it be? If something truly mattered, didn’t it demand intensity? If a dream was worth chasing, didn’t it call for force? The world does not open easily, and I learned early that doors had to be pushed because something on the other side was always pushing back. Over time, through experience and different situations, my mind rewired itself, and my posture hardened into a habit. I became skilled at many things, especially pushing.
The work itself never felt wrong. I loved writing. I loved creating in many forms. I loved teaching. I enjoyed building companies and projects. I cherished the strange and wonderful spaces where ideas moved between people and something unexpected appeared in every room. Those moments of exchange and growth felt like the closest I knew to being true to myself, but the path to them still carried a constant, underlying tension that I rarely examined, even though I always felt it. I assumed it was simply part of the deal. Years passed this way, much of my life.
The shift happened gradually enough that I didn’t notice it at first. Nothing sudden or dramatic took place, no failures, no collapses, no abrupt rejections that forced a change in direction. I kept climbing. The work continued. The invitations kept coming. The doors I pushed so hard against started to open. I kept writing, speaking, and building the things I believed were worth creating, but something began to change within the movement itself.
I started to notice, gradually, that the urgency that had driven me and been inside me for so long was beginning to fade. Projects still mattered, but they no longer felt like evidence of anything. Conversations still energized me, but they didn’t carry the same weight to confirm my place in the world. My focus started to expand beyond work. I didn’t lessen anything; I added my family life to the mix with the same sense of purpose. Professionally, then personally, the invisible clock kept ticking. Yet, something strange happened: the constant ticking somewhere behind my ribs and in my gut began to fade, then grew oddly silent, enough to scare me. At first, I wondered if I had lost my edge, or maybe I had climbed so high that there was nowhere left to climb.
To me, intensity was synonymous with vitality. As intensity faded, it left behind an unfamiliar silence. I lacked the experience to understand or accept it. Sometimes, I would sit down to work in the mornings and notice that the old edge, the one that had propelled me forward for so many years with relentless energy, was no longer there in the same way. It felt unsettling. Shouldn’t I be feeling stressed this morning? The absence of stress felt wrong, as if a hole had opened somewhere. The work was still there. The desire to do everything well persisted. What had disappeared was the feeling that the work needed to justify my existence.
For years, I believed and knew that striving was the driving force of my life. Without it, I thought, the entire structure of who I was and what I had built might fall apart, yet the opposite seemed to be happening. The work continued, but it changed. The writing deepened. The conversations felt less like performances and more like authentic encounters. I found myself listening longer, talking less, pausing before responding, and letting ideas come in their own time instead of forcing them. I began to see my mind shift from rapid change to deep transformation. I wondered if it was age. I questioned whether something essential was fading. But it was something else, still without a name or face. The love of the work was still there exactly as before. What had vanished was the tension that once surrounded it.
I began to realize that much of the effort I had invested wasn’t really about the work itself. It was about what the work might prove. Every project once carried a subtle secondary goal: to confirm that I was moving in the right direction and that the path I chose mattered. When that need was alleviated, writing felt less like arguing with the future and more like engaging with the present. Teaching felt less like displaying knowledge and more like sharing a space with people who were thinking their way through something together. Even the long days of organizing and planning, which once felt like necessary battles against time, began to take on a calmer rhythm. As I loosened, my work shifted as well. The life I loved no longer required the intense striving that once defined it. The realization was both simple and disorienting.
One afternoon, while at my desk, I realized that hours had passed without the usual tightness in my chest that often came with long periods of focus. I had been writing steadily, absorbed in my work, moving smoothly from one idea to the next with a calm attention that felt almost strange. When I got up and went into the kitchen, I noticed that the day had gone by without that old sense of pressure. Nothing had been forced. The work had simply happened.
I reflected on earlier years when every step forward seemed to need a kind of inner strength, as if the next moment might demand more effort than the last. I remembered the determination that carried me through those times, the relentless push that opened doors that might otherwise have stayed closed. The past brought me to where I am today. I don’t regret any of it. The effort served its purpose. It carried me through landscapes where effort was the only language that worked. It built things that mattered. It took me to rooms I had once only dreamed of entering, but somewhere along the way, the reason for that stance quietly faded. The work I love no longer needs to be defended by force. It has become its own justification.
Looking back on the past, I see my younger self moving forward with admirable determination, overcoming obstacles that once seemed impossible. I feel gratitude and tenderness for that version of myself. That younger man believed that intensity was the price of meaning, and in many ways, he was right; however, the life that followed didn’t require the same approach. The projects still mattered. The conversations still mattered. The writing still mattered. My family still mattered. What changed was the environment around those things. The atmosphere felt clearer, the movements lighter, and living no longer carried the burden of proving anything beyond itself. Instead, it demanded attention. When I finally saw it, the fullness of life had always been there.
I still worked. I still built things. I still loved. I still followed the ideas that sparked my curiosity and the conversations that drew me deeper into the strange and beautiful experience of being alive, but the motion felt different. The clock had stopped ticking somewhere beyond my awareness, and when I finally noticed the silence it left behind, I realized that the life I had been chasing had quietly been walking beside me all along.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
LIMITS
In “Limits,” Clay Stafford reflects on the lifelong belief that success requires pushing through every obstacle and never admitting weakness. Over time, however, he realized that ignoring personal limits can lead to exhaustion, frustration, and a narrowing of curiosity and creativity. Rather than being barriers, limits can act as guides—helping us focus our energy on what truly matters and preserving the clarity, purpose, and depth that meaningful work requires.
I was raised to believe that when I came to an obstacle, it was a personal shortcoming if I did not push through, a personal failure if I did not succeed, and a personal cowardice if I gave up. Those beliefs inhabited the marrow of my bones and festered in the recesses of my brain. I had no natural limits, none of us did, or so I thought and was bred to believe. Even giving credence to such an absurd suggestion felt irresponsible. I knew I and everyone else could overcome anything if we only pushed hard enough. There was no skill we couldn’t learn, no talent we couldn’t expand, no mountain we could not climb. I not only judged myself; I judged everyone. I taught it to my students and in my lectures. We all needed to be responsible for the optimal performance of our lives. It was called being dependable, being responsible, rising to the challenge, working harder and smarter, and pushing through. The push was always highly emotional, causing stress and conflict not only in me but in all my relationships, where others’ performances fell short, but I knew it was worth it. It brought out the best in all of us. Like a winning coach, I pushed myself and those around me. And when they pushed back, I viewed their lack of participation as denial and even laziness. Emotionally wrought, I could never see the mental clarity lost in this thinking. From the dejected faces of those I lived and worked with, it seemed I failed in the very presence that I thought I was being, the one I thought I was protecting. Even in that, I strove to do better.
The satisfaction of control brought me peace, or so I thought. I put myself in charge of my destiny. I oversaw my own future, and nothing could get in the way of that, and very little did. I offered every problem and relationship a doorway that could make things easier for me and everyone around me, but if it was blocked, I had no qualms about going through the wall. Pushing longer, harder, and stronger was, to me, a form of commitment. Staying with a problem until the end of the day, even if that day ran into the night, or even several days without sleep, was applaudable devotion and intention. Accepting limits or growing tired meant one had no self-respect. This was how a meaningful life was to be built; the lives of the great men and women I read in biographies exemplified that. They pushed through because they had something all of us could acquire: character. They built meaningful lives; I would, too. Endurance, discipline, and refusal to quit were the framework of success. Refusal to quit meant refusal to retreat, like cowards, like those who were weak. Even rest itself, I told myself, could wait. “I can sleep when I’m dead” was not uncommon coming out of my mouth in reply to those who were close to me and cared, as I popped my trucker’s caffeine pills, drank my ten Cuban coffees, and my gallon of daily tea.
The cost of this thinking and living with such force didn’t show up immediately. It took decades. That’s the deception we take to heart when we believe the deceitfulness chocked at us by the sycophants of the famous. The famous lied to the watching world, the obsequious flatterers lied to readers of books about great men and women, and then I took those as truths and lied to myself. Sure, the lies gave me extra waking time, or something that resembled it anyway. I learned how to stretch the day thinner, how to draw more from myself than I thought I could. The point that activity didn’t always equal accomplishment, though, was often lost on me. What I gained in hours, I lost, though I didn’t realize it, in life and relational clarity. After decades of this rat race, my attention to the important things, not just the walls to burst through, began to dull. My decisions about where to focus slowed. Simple things began to take longer, though I attributed that to age. Regardless, the very life I had always believed I was protecting by defining my own fate began to resist me.
I began to see, or rather I began to feel, that the very wall that I could not seem to push through was myself. Nothing dramatic happened to show me this. Fatigue didn’t announce itself to me publicly. Nothing in my life collapsed. Feeling tired all the time wasn’t bad; it was my baseline. Yet, focus began to take on the persona of irritation toward my work, myself, and the people around me. I no longer set out to tackle only the big things; small problems now carried more weight than they should have, and small mistakes by others began to irritate me. Life began to feel painful, even at times undesirable. Everything became such a big deal. I found that where I used to slam through walls, I began to make choices not out of intention, but out of relief. I became drawn to whatever would end the discomfort the fastest.
Being successful, I began to wonder, why did I feel at rock bottom? Being high in my profession, having relationships others would envy, having built the life I envisioned, something had to change, though I didn’t know how to give it a name. My choices began to become ill-guided, not from indifference, but from dullness. The part of me that once noticed nuance grew silent. Subtle distinctions in life, work, and people disappeared. I lost my sense of when effort was required and when time was the truer answer. I could still function, but I was compensating, now relying totally on force on everything where attention and inspiration once worked cleanly.
Then came denial, and the emotional cost that followed. Each time I overrode the yokes, big and small, that pulled me down, I taught myself not to listen. Signals that I used to welcome began to annoy me. They were inconveniences to my peace. Discomfort became something to suppress, to submit to silently rather than with understanding. Gradually, all trust eroded, not just in my body, mind, emotions, or energy, but in myself in general. A faint impatience began to settle in, yet flat, a sense that I was now pushing through life, all parts of it, still accomplishing, but rather than moving with it, things were no longer flowing.
As a result of shutting out the world and the world within my own head, my world narrowed. Limits began to change perspective. Everything became about getting through the day. Curiosity, my lifeblood, even began to fade. I knew something needed to be done, but that was the problem. I had everything I could ever want. Recovery from that seemed crazy and certainly ungratefully indulgent. Surprise began to have no place or excitement. My world was perfect. I was not in crisis, yet I was living as though I were. Survival mode replaced presence without my consent. Everyone around me felt it or felt the brunt of what I would not share.
I think the most dangerous part was how ordinary it all felt. Nothing told me to stop. Nothing told me to slow down. Nothing hinted at any type of collapse. Nothing told me I needed to stop bashing walls. No one told me I had a problem, or if they did, I didn’t hear. What I was doing, though, was operating below capacity, and I’d been doing it for way too long. I focused on my limitations to the point of obsession, at the expense of seriousness and gratitude about what I could control. There were limitations that I could not power through, I realized after too many years. And because I didn’t realize this earlier, all limitations, even challenges, began to operate out of the same intensity. Out of the blue, it hit me that if I couldn’t power through certain things that didn’t erase who I was or what I could become despite them. I realized that maybe those walls were there for a reason, that maybe I was meant to be something I didn’t consciously see myself as. The realization was slow and painful, but my life began to change. Centering took the place of warfare.
My limits took on a new light. They were never obstacles; they were misconceptions on my part. They were even guardians of who I was meant to be. The sad thing is, I had been deluded and deluded myself for a lifetime. I recognized the pundits of the super life were frauds. I began to respect those limits. At first, I didn’t respect limits dramatically or perfectly, but rather honestly, and, when I did, something softened inside me like the Grinch’s frozen heart. Efforts on things that were within my limits became cleaner. Decisions within my framework grew quieter and more precise. Life began to deepen again, rather than merely expanding. I began to do less because I stopped slamming into walls and instead spent my time doing more. That was the paradox. In fact, I did better at everything I did. The cost of refusing to stop at natural limitations had been the gradual loss of the very capacities that made my efforts meaningful in the first place. Limits and walls became not challenges to defeat, but invitations to stop long enough to acknowledge, honor, and preserve those things that did matter within the sphere of life I’d been given in which to live. Limits became no more than a beautiful river in my life, a life without a boat, that asked me to choose the path to the left or to the right when it told me in so many ways I could not cross but promised adventure no matter which direction I chose.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
LISTENING
In “LISTENING,” Clay Stafford reflects on how stillness, restraint, and quiet attention reshape understanding, relationships, and meaning. Instead of solving, pushing, or fixing, he discovers that discernment and presence — listening without needing to act — can deepen insight and transform how we live, create, and make decisions.
I always believed that human glory and life’s meaning were found in the senses: what I saw, touched, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted as I sped down the passing lane of accomplishment. These things provided the richness of living, complementary to the mountainous regions of sentience, the arcs and trajectories of being, and the hills and valleys of experience, the satisfaction of the present moment, and the excitement of things to come. Moving through those elevations and absorbing the delight of each moment seemed attainable only through effort and discipline, verified by visible signs of progress. Passivity, I believed, would not allow fate to deepen. Nor would acceptance or routine. I was not born intentionally appreciating what surrounded me. It was up to me to seek it out. Without intention or constant effort, something in me dragged me downward, turning me negative, and closed my eyes to the beauty held even as close as a flower in my hand.
For me, work and sacrifice were never separate. I approached my work the same way I approached my love of conduct: as a builder, a creator, someone constructing what I envisioned and leaving nothing to chance, mitigating the risk of even a moment lived without purpose. Committed to experience and beauty and the love of spirit, I lived with the belief and what felt like proof that if I worked hard enough, planned carefully enough, and remained devoted to improvement, the more profound human aspects, such as spirituality, intellectual pleasure, and emotional fulfillment, would arrive on their own. I only needed to lay the tracks. I assumed understanding, timing, and wisdom would naturally follow once the visible work and confirmation to my senses were undeniable. What I did not realize was that the skill that mattered most, the one that would ultimately transform my existence and my relationships, was not something I could see, touch, feel, hear, smell, or taste. It was not visible at all. It belonged to the category of things I assumed would take care of themselves if I were disciplined enough to live an examined, well-lived reality.
Whether innate or shaped through observation as I grew and matured, I came to believe that vitality was shaped entirely by purposeful intention. When something failed to work, maybe a relationship, a decision, or a season of my lifestyle, I tried to fix it the only way I knew how: by adding more effort, more thinking, more explanation, more force, more control. Wasn’t it my responsibility to build an existence I could eventually look back on without regret, one I could reach the end of and say, well done? For me, clarity came from that assertion, from believing meaning could be pressed into place if I pushed hard enough and demanded transformation. It was unsettling to discover that my diligence, the very trait I trusted most, was often working against me.
At one of my lowest points, I realized that one’s lot was more than experience, sensation, and action. Viability, I found, communicates just as clearly when it is encountered quietly, indirectly, and without urgency. Being a fixer revealed its limits in moments that required no solution, situations that asked for no action, and questions that had no immediate answers. I flailed there. I didn’t know how to stand still. I wanted so much more from destiny than what I believed I had been given that I failed to notice what was already present. When this recognition arrived, it did so subtly, yet with quiet unease. The problems that continued to trouble me were not rooted in lack of effort or achievement. They stemmed from failure to listen to things that did not need to be, but were, without asking for my attention.
Hearing and choosing when not to attend was what I had missed. Discernment. Not paying attention for approval or instruction, but being attentive for boundaries, for signals, for the difference between what wanted to be rushed and what needed time. I had to hear the quiet truth that some things were not asking me to act, repair, or improve; they were asking me to stop interfering. And yet, I wasn’t taking heed.
To my surprise, taking into account itself became an act. It was not passive. It required restraint and patience. Concentrating asked me to tolerate uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. It asked me to leave unfinished things unfinished, to resist tidying them up or wrapping them up prematurely. Keeping my ears open meant trusting that clarity sometimes arrived only after I stopped demanding it.
At first, this felt unproductive. From the outside, monitoring resembled hesitation, pausing instead of advancing, waiting instead of fixing. When I stopped pushing, I felt lost. In doing nothing, I wondered what I was doing at all. There were fewer markers of progress, no surge of momentum, no thrill of accomplishment. Slowing down felt uncomfortable in a world and in my own world that rewarded decisiveness and speed. And yet, something began to change.
When I took note instead of forcing outcomes, the quality of my decisions shifted. My perceptions changed. I stopped shaping results that didn’t truly fit. I recognized when something was complete rather than refining it beyond necessity. I learned, often uncomfortably, that others did not always want solutions; they wanted to be heard. Silence, I discovered, could carry weight without being filled, and tuning in altered my understanding of doubt. Uncertainty became information rather than a shortcoming. Things were not broken; they were unresolved, and that distinction mattered. It gave me patience I had never practiced before.
I came to understand that the apparent inactivity of focusing was itself a form of action. It was not instinctive. Like any skill, it was built slowly through humility, repetition, and restraint. It sharpened not through effort, but by stepping back and allowing actuality to reveal itself without interruption. Once perceived, it grew. It became the foundation beneath every visible skill, every tangible accomplishment. Everything I did depended on this quiet test for its truest execution.
The quietness began to permeate my continuation. I found myself longing for it. No amount of effort could replace it. No amount of planning could override it. Without lending an ear, progress dissolved into noise. A new reality had come. And in returning to the full circle, I discovered something unexpected: even stillness had direction. I had not underestimated listening because I considered it unimportant. I underestimated it because it was quiet.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
THE CHAIR IS STILL THERE
On mornings when creativity feels hollow and momentum seems absent, Clay Stafford learned a crucial lesson: the work of a life isn’t built on inspiration or certainty. In “The Chair Is Still There,” he reflects on how discipline, presence, and the simple act of returning to his chair—cup of coffee in hand—reframe his creative life, strengthen his relationship to his art, and allow meaning to emerge without fanfare.
By Clay Stafford
Mostly working from home for the majority of my life, there was no boss to meet, no comptroller checking my clock-in for work, no meetings I had to be on time for, only me, waking up and stretching in bed, thinking of how I envisioned my day to play out.
Most days were and are filled with excitement. I knew what I was going to do. I loved what I did. I was blessed to be able to do it. Most mornings were filled with ambition and excitement, so I couldn’t wait to get to work and get started. But there were those dreaded mornings when I awoke, stared at the ceiling, and realized there was no fuel in the creative engine for the day. On those mornings, there was no urgency to get out of bed, no spark inspiring me to begin. There wasn’t even resistance. In the dim light of the morning sun coming through the cracks of the closed plantation shutters, there was simply a hollow quiet where momentum typically was and should have been. Those moments felt empty, nothing resembling the welcomed heaviness of life, just a distant void, as though everything that normally mattered had somehow, during the night while I was dreaming, slipped down the hallway to another bedroom and closed the door, sometimes even locking it behind it, climbing into the bed and pulling the covers over its head.
Those were days that felt like failures even before they began, and because I predetermined them while lying in bed, they usually turned out as I expected. I used to think I could only show up for my life when my inner world was in agreement, when want and purpose matched, when I knew why I was doing something, and when the effort made sense. I could only do things when I felt like it or when the meaning was clear. When that alignment was absent, I assumed the day was already lost and a wasted day of failure lay ahead. I felt it in my heart and even in my bones. I hadn’t yet learned that the real discipline of my life wasn’t built on feeling ready, but on returning.
It wasn’t until later in my life, when maybe maturity or practice, or even serendipitous events, proved me wrong, that I realized these mornings were simply a different kind of threshold, their own unique entry into a day that, at first glance, felt formless and uninspired. Somewhere along the way, I learned that discipline, what I needed to create the perfect day, was less about preplanning, force, or even intention, but more about presence.
I don’t know when my thinking started to shift. I certainly didn’t make it happen. I didn’t will it. It certainly wasn’t some trite self-help or productivity hack. It didn’t even arrive with some revelation. It came oddly and unplanned, as a habit. Whether I had the vision for the day or not, I got my coffee as usual, set up my desk, and sat down in my chair to work, even when I didn’t know what I wanted to work on or, if I did, even when I wasn’t inspired. Motivation didn’t earn me a spot at my desk. Routine did. On those days, I kept the bar low. I didn’t promise much to those hours except the assurance to my computer that I’ll be close by if needed. No plans were negotiated, no meaning defined, and rarely was any enthusiasm offered to the Muse as tribute. Sometimes on those days, I thought my purpose in life was to drink a cup of coffee, watch my birdfeeder, and ponder, in the world of evolution, what crazy lizard found itself jumping out of a tree and realizing it could fly, thus creating a new species of birds. In other words, with no plans or inspiration, I sat there because I didn’t know what else to do.
It surprised me at some point how little was required to sit there. It was freeing. Even on those hollow mornings, the chair was still there, waiting. I didn’t need conviction. I didn’t need direction. I didn’t need to believe that anything I was doing mattered. I only needed not to leave. I needed to sit with whatever drifted through my mind. The common thread behind it all was my chair, on productive days and on days of nothing. It was always sitting there, consistent, no matter where my head was. So, I returned to it, some days with more fervor than others, but always with a refusal to hand over control to the weather outside (I write outside on my porch) or even the weather, no matter how calm or turbulent, going on inside of me.
Those neutral days of nothingness were not heroic. They were days that neither lifted nor dragged, days that offered no motivational or dramatic reason or inspiration to move forward, but at the same time, no compelling reason not to be there. It seemed on those days that the world asked nothing of me other than attendance in that chair, across the lawn from the birdfeeder, pondering the processes of the past few million years.
When I think back on my own evolution now, what strikes me is not how much time I wasted sitting there, but rather how honest those hours were. Out of boredom, I did begin to tinker, but without the need or motivation to impress, accelerate, or aim beyond the moment, I moved straight to the essentials as they popped into my head. It was all rather casual. There was no adornment, no performance, no word count, no chasing of superiority. Just small, impulsive, inner-driven activities, whether rain or shine, just some sort of private continuity with days more productive, but with no invisible audience or ego applauding, but at the same time nothing left undone. When inspired, sitting in the chair, I did what I felt inspired to do, letting direction come from the nothingness.
Over time, something shifted. Those neutral (I wouldn’t call them wasted) days, those unremarkable returns to the chair each morning, began to alter the way I understood myself in the same way that I could envision lizards growing wings millions of years ago. I don’t think I ever patted myself on my back for my consistency of sitting in a chair (that hardly seems a heroic act), but I did begin to trust it as an inkling of something I couldn’t put my finger on began to take form in my consciousness, in my being. Showing up and sitting down, I began to sense that I did not need to feel aligned with my work or even with myself to remain connected. Just drink coffee and watch the birds, and occasionally look at my computer screen. I didn’t need the weather, inside or out, to give me permission. Before I stepped into the day, I needed to go to my chair and sit. And, surprise to me, somewhere along the way, my fingers would find their way to the keyboard, and I would start to type. Somewhere by the end of the day, I would pause and look back on all that I had accomplished, even though I had had no preplanned direction.
Trust accumulated in ways I couldn’t have articulated then, but it did soften the drama around the difficulty of being aimless. It quieted the argument between desire and duty. It reframed commitment as identity rather than effort. I began to see that most of what endures in life is built not on bursts of certainty but on the steady, unimpressive, evolutionary cadence of return.
The curious, but also understandable, thing is that the work of my life didn’t constantly improve in those days, but my relationship with my work, and even myself, did. Sitting down in my chair became less conditional, less dependent on mood or inspiration, or the unpredictable tides of self-belief or raw motivation. Sitting down in my chair became, instead, something like a morning welcome, a companionship, coming with the predictability and comfort of knowing that the sun will rise each day and I will sit: steady, imperfect, patient.
Looking back, I never found the dramatic clarity I once believed I needed to move forward. I saw something quieter. I discovered that life continues, like birds in flight, even when eagerness does not. I found that meaning doesn’t always come hand in hand with willingness. I discovered that neutrality is fertile in its own way. We don’t need a parade; we only need a chair.
I once thought that discipline was a loud, cinematic declaration, something founded in great ambition or proven with relentless, knock-the-walls-down drive, but the truth, for me, instead lived in a place outside on the back porch, an ordinary chair, waiting without fanfare, and asking for nothing other than my presence. “Come as you are,” it called. “If nothing else,” it said in its Southern way, “just sit a spell.”
Perhaps the unexpected lesson for me is this: the parts of life that endure are not always those born from passion, certainty, or predetermination while lying in the bed in the morning and staring at the ceiling with the morning light coming in through the shutters, but instead it is from the steady, unremarkable decision to get my coffee, in my routine, and sit in my chair long enough for meaning to find its way back. The chair is always waiting.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
MAKING IT BEFORE IT HAS A NAME
Some of life’s most meaningful beginnings don’t come with a blueprint or a clear explanation—they arrive before they have a name. In this reflective essay, Clay Stafford explores how the most authentic parts of his life emerged long before he understood them, teaching him to stay open to unnamed possibilities and to let meaning grow at its own pace.
By Clay Stafford
There were periods when I began something simply out of interest, long before I understood why, and, oddly, the not-knowing at times unsettled me more than the effort itself. I am, by nature, a planner and a builder, and to be the best at that, one needs to know from the start what they are constructing. It’s a little irresponsible to build a skyscraper without planning and realize, too late, that you didn’t put the right foundation under the building. The longer I lived, the more I noticed a pattern that didn’t quite make sense to me: some of the most authentic things in my life began before they could be explained, and naming them too early seemed to shrink what they were trying to become, as if definition became a filter or a cell. I didn’t have that concept at the time, but the truth of it lingered as something I wouldn’t understand for years, something that existed long before I found the words to recognize it. I began to realize that some of the most important things in my life only revealed their meaning after I was already living them.
I can think of decisions, relationships, detours, and changes I made in my life that began without language, without an expressed idea, what a writer might call a “thesis statement.” Without a plan, I found myself moving toward people, places, projects, and experiences that couldn’t really be justified. Beginnings were always small, sometimes even unnoticed, like quiet shifts that pointed me away from what was familiar to something new and unknown without offering any clarity or expectations of what might come next. As it expanded into my life, my days, my consciousness, the absence of explanation began to feel like a kind of unnameable negligence, as though I owed myself, if not the world, some sort of rationale before I took the next step. The interesting thing about life, though, and especially adventure, is that nothing meaningful arrives with instructions.
Some beginnings took the form of restlessness, sometimes bordering on boredom. Others came from a pull I couldn’t seem to ignore. I didn’t think or plan my way into those moments as much as I moved my way into them by some magnetic, yet unnamed, attraction. Whatever meaning they carried waited there and didn’t announce itself at the start, like a wrapped birthday present asking to be eagerly opened with childhood innocence, but only when the birthday came. Meaning surfaced only after the momentum of action, movement, or interest, unexplained, but happening, after I gave up wanting certainty that my time or emotions were not wasted. I wanted assurance before I pulled the paper away from the birthday box, wanted to see what was inside before I undid the ribbon.
For much of my life, I resisted this uncertain stage. Maybe it was the way I was raised as a child, but it always felt safer to have clarity before action, certainty before motion. It was inherent in me to want to know the ending, what it meant, whether it was safe, and how I could justify myself if anyone should ask. Without clarity and the words, always the words, which may be why I am a writer, I always felt exposed, awkward in a way that left me sometimes rehearsing the answer, the justification, before I had completely made the choice, even as I was already traveling down an unknown path through a forest dappled with light, leaves flickering with moving brightness, the smell of wet earth rising, without the faintest hint of what it boded.
Being someone who plays chess rather than checkers, beginning something, anything, without clarity required a different posture than I was used to. Those moments asked that I enter them without strategy, even without ambition, but only presence. Being foreign to me, I didn’t have a name for what was happening then other than those moments, things, people, or ideas embraced something that kept me returning to those half-formed beginnings, unidentifiable hopes, and curious opportunities, and that returning to them by some magnetic, unexplainable pull mattered even, at times, if none of it made any sense.
In the worlds I circled, I looked to efficiency and expediency, even in relationships, and from the outside, this way of moving probably looked highly inefficient. In those unnamed spaces, false starts, reversals, and in-between states that didn’t add up clouded the clarity. I collected experiences that didn’t seem connected, yet over time, they began to mark the edges of something that appeared to form out of the mist. They revealed what stayed and what fell away. They traced a shape I did not realize I had been drawing, yet had been seemingly unconsciously engineering from the start.
It was later in life, after I had been married and even after I had a son, that I stopped using the phrases “happy accidents” and “bumbling through life.” Something began to shift when I stopped asking these innocuous beginnings to declare themselves too early. I let them happen. I felt less urgency to start justifying each step. I think part of it was because I had put myself into a world that didn’t require an explanation, a happy place of unconditional love and acceptance, something that came with marrying the right person. Because of this foundation, I didn’t rush decisions simply to escape uncertainty. I let things “percolate,” as my son coined, when he was near an adult. I noticed the quiet gravity of what I kept returning to when those things called to me from the fog, and how nothing real in those voices demanded immediate clarity or even a call back from me in return. Understanding, when it came at all, arrived later, subtle, without fanfare, and I began to let it happen in its own natural way.
The real tension wasn’t in not knowing; it was in the impulse to decide too quickly what something was supposed to be. I saw clearly that each time I started something that seemed to fall into my lap with questions, to name it, to give it a beginning point before it lived, shrank it to match my description of it, rather than allowing it to slowly manifest itself, like the bloom of a flower, into its own possibilities, shape, form, and even my relationship with or appreciation of it. Slowly, through life practice and observation, I learned to wait a little longer. An egg is an egg, but if you wait, to one’s ultimate surprise, a chick may emerge. “Wait a little longer” became my mantra. I needed to allow experience to accumulate before drawing conclusions or judging. Even without my “input,” refinement happened, though it may not have been there in the start, as the Old Me would have desired. In contrast, when meaning did arrive, it arrived as something real, something that could be refined, the “happy accident” seeming predestined on its own. That is how the subconscious works. It is a land hidden, but a calculating world in its own right.
Many of the meaningful shifts in my life didn’t arrive as predetermined or mapped plans. I didn’t select them from a menu of options or make deliberate choices. They appeared first at the periphery while I was occupied with living and paying attention, and they continued even when I couldn’t articulate what they were, what I was feeling, or the purpose or endpoint. I guess what I got out of all this, so many years later, is that life isn’t always the execution of a strategy. Sometimes it is the slow uncovering of one. Venturing into the unknown before I understood the “meaning of it all” wasn’t carelessness or irresponsibility. It was a way, and continues to be a way, of staying open long enough for meaning to emerge on its own through movement and unveiling rather than planning and anticipation. Some of the truest parts of my life found their names only after I let them exist as long as needed without one, and I suspect that might be the only way I would have ever recognized them at all.
Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.
Staying Motivated in a Writing Career
Writing success rarely happens overnight—it’s a long game. Discover practical strategies and mindset shifts to stay motivated through the ups and downs of your writing journey.
“People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don’t know when to quit. Most people succeed because they are determined to. Persevere and get it done.”
—George Allen
Staying Motivated
Think of it this way: Failure is a single event, while success is a process.
You should realize (if you hadn’t before) that the road to success is a long, constant journey, not a short sprint to a nearby finish line. Many writers quit before achieving success, including some who were close and would have made it with just a bit more effort. You never know how close you are, where the tipping point will be. In the past couple of years, two of my favorite writers suddenly broke into top-level, best-seller, well-deserved, breakout success after many years of toiling in the trenches. It seemed to happen overnight, and yet they’d been working diligently for years to make it happen and had a number of excellent books out.
Why are you writing? To make money, win awards, get famous? Those are external goals, out of your control. What you can control is your production, your author brand, and how hard you’re willing to work. If you’re not having fun, and it’s taking a toll on your life, it may not be the thing you think you wanted. But if you have that need to write, to get your stories out to the world, you’ll keep going.
How does one persist when success seems unobtainable? One book I highly recommend is Motivate Your Writing!: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life, by Stephen Kelner. He’s also married to a writer, so he knows his stuff.
Before my first novel was published, I was chomping at the bit to get it out. Publication seemed just out of reach for several years, and I had to prod myself to keep going. One Christmas I printed out the book draft, put the pages in a binder, wrapped it, and gave it to myself as a Christmas gift. Though my family thought it strange, it was terrific motivation and gave me a boost to continue thinking about the day when I would hold a real print copy of my first novel. That day came, and many more of amazing success. One Christmas, I had three unfinished novels, another I wanted to write, and hadn’t published enough work in too long a while. So, I printed title covers, attached them to other books, wrapped them, and gave them to myself as more gifts, as a promise and a commitment that I’d get to work and finish and publish them.
I’m motivated by the stories of amazing writers (and other artists, musicians, entertainers, and creative people) of talent who had a much tougher time of it, who struggled to get published and make a living in years past. Now we can get published whenever we want, but the hard part is getting sold and read. Inspirational quotes and success stories help keep me going. I look outside writing, to success and motivation gurus, to see if I can use techniques for success from other walks of life. By keeping a positive attitude, you can push through the dark days. The habit of success keeps you on track when you encounter setbacks. Do not allow events to stop you. Learn the power of the word NO when asked for things that will suck up your time if they prevent you from finishing projects.
Chart Your Success
Because our minds gloss over the day-to-day, the usual and familiar, it’s quite useful to keep a writing log for recording what steps you take and see how much you do over time. Writing a book may seem like it goes on forever, so keep logs of what you do, to keep on track and motivated.
This can be as simple as making a time and word count entry in a notebook, or in a spreadsheet or document on a computer. You want to build momentum, so that a string of days of writing encourages you to do more. Each day that you’ve put new words down is a success! It’s great to look at the accumulated results after a few months of work, and it truly feels like accomplishment.
You should also keep track of other parts of writing activities and successes. Publications, new editions, acceptances, good reviews, big sales, milestones reached, all that and more come together into a success chart. Record what advances you’ve made, and they will mount up into a tidal wave. You want to look back and see that you’ve made progress. Little steps in the right direction for big results.
Dale T. Phillips has published novels, story collections, non-fiction, and over 80 short stories. Stephen King was Dale's college writing teacher, and since then, Dale has found time to appear on stage, television, radio, in an independent feature film, and compete on Jeopardy (losing in a spectacular fashion). He's a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sisters in Crime. He's traveled to all 50 states, Mexico, Canada, and through Europe.
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