You Cannot Become What You Have Not Taken The Time To Store.

Devotion vs Discipline a reflection from within the House

It was 5 p.m. and I was sitting at my desk with my notebook open and a pen in my hand, trying to convince myself to write.

I had made a commitment to write for an hour every day at 5 p.m. It sounded simple enough when I decided it. One hour. Same time. Same practice. Show up every day. But somewhere along the way, the thing that had once felt exciting had begun to feel like an obligation. I would sit down already feeling the weight of having to produce something, and before I had even written a word, I was tired of writing.

I began questioning myself. Where had my discipline gone? Why was I struggling to do something I had once loved so much? I wondered whether I had simply become undisciplined, whether I needed to be harder on myself, whether I needed to stop making excuses and simply do what I had said I would do.

There was something strangely familiar about that feeling. The moment something becomes important to us, we can begin to believe that the only way to honour it is to become stricter with ourselves. We create rules around it. We give it a time, a place, a measure. We tell ourselves that if we are serious about becoming good at something, we must be consistent. And slowly, without noticing, the relationship can disappear beneath the structure we created to protect it.

That afternoon, I eventually got up from my desk.

I went outside and sat near the pool. The wind was soft, and for the first time that day I wasn’t asking myself to produce anything. I was simply there. And then I noticed something caught in the branch of a tree. It was a dark red ribbon.

I recognised it immediately. It was the same ribbon the wind had taken from me a few days before.

I watched it move in the branches. It wasn’t fighting the wind. It wasn’t trying to hold itself in one particular position. It moved when the wind moved. It softened when the wind softened. There was something almost graceful about the way it seemed to belong to the movement rather than resist it.

And I remember thinking, I want my writing to feel like that.

I didn’t want to keep pulling myself towards the page as though the page were somewhere I was supposed to go. I wanted to feel the movement again. I wanted to feel curious. I wanted to be surprised by what might come out of me. I wanted writing to feel like a place I could enter, rather than a task I had to complete.

A little later, I fell asleep.

It wasn’t planned. I simply allowed myself to rest. When I woke, the light had begun to change and the sun was moving towards the end of the day. And somehow, something in me had changed with it. I felt refreshed. There was an energy in me again, a small but unmistakable desire to write.

I reached for my notebook and pen.

And this time, I didn’t have to make myself write.

The words came.

One page became another. Then another. I didn’t notice the time passing. I didn’t think about the hour I was supposed to complete. I wasn’t watching the clock or measuring my productivity. I was simply inside the experience of writing again. By the time I looked up, the sun had disappeared, and I was sitting with several pages in front of me feeling something I hadn’t felt in a while.

Pride.

Not the pride of having completed my daily requirement, but the quieter kind that comes from feeling connected to yourself again.

It was then that I began to understand what had been happening.

Perhaps I hadn’t lost my discipline.

Perhaps I had lost my devotion.

There is nothing wrong with discipline. Discipline can be beautiful. It can give something a container when life is scattered. It can help us return when motivation disappears. It can teach us to stay with something long enough to become familiar with it. There are seasons in life when discipline is exactly what carries us through.

But discipline without relationship can become very hard.

It can become a voice that says, You said you would do this, so you must.

And when we miss a day, we punish ourselves. When we don’t feel inspired, we force ourselves. When our bodies ask for something different, we interpret it as resistance. Eventually, the practice that was meant to bring us closer to something we love begins to create distance from it.

That was what had happened with my writing.

I had turned something I loved into a kind of 9-to-5. I had become so focused on proving that I could be consistent that I had stopped asking what I was actually trying to remain connected to.

Devotion feels different.

Devotion begins with relationship. It asks not only, What needs to be done? but How would I like to meet this today?

It leaves room for the fact that we are not the same person every day. The woman who writes beautifully at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday may need to write in the morning on Thursday. Another day, she may need to take her notebook outside. Another day, she may write from bed, at the kitchen table, in a park, or while waiting somewhere she hadn’t planned to be. Sometimes she may write for an hour. Sometimes she may write for ten minutes. Sometimes she may need to step away completely and allow something inside her to gather before it is ready to become words.

The practice has not disappeared simply because the form has changed.

This is where I think we sometimes misunderstand consistency.

We can become so attached to the idea that consistency means repeating the same behaviour in exactly the same way that we fail to recognise another kind of consistency: the consistency of returning.

Returning to the thing.

Returning to the relationship.

Returning to the part of ourselves that comes alive when we do it.

Devotion does not mean that we abandon commitment. It means that the commitment is no longer separated from the thing we actually care about.

When I think about the red ribbon now, I think about this distinction. The ribbon did not stop being a ribbon because it moved with the wind. It did not lose itself because it was no longer still. Its movement was part of its relationship with what was around it.

Perhaps our practices can be like that too.

Perhaps there is a way of staying committed without becoming rigid. A way of being consistent without becoming mechanical. A way of honouring something without turning it into another place where we have to prove ourselves.

For me, the question became less about, How do I make myself write every day? and more about, How do I remain in relationship with writing?

That question changed something.

It opened up possibility.

I began to see that there were many ways I could meet the practice. I could play with it. I could follow an idea when it appeared rather than waiting for the appointed hour. I could take a notebook with me. I could allow myself to rest. I could read when I had nothing to write. I could notice something beautiful and let it become part of the work later. I could write because something in me wanted to be expressed, not simply because the clock told me it was time.

And perhaps this is where devotion becomes its own kind of discipline.

When we are devoted to something, we become familiar with it. We learn its rhythms. We notice when it needs tending and when it needs space. We begin to understand what helps it flourish.

A relationship with a craft is not built only through the hours we force ourselves to spend on it. It is built through attention. Through curiosity. Through returning. Through allowing ourselves to know it from different angles.

The same is true beyond creativity.

We can approach our relationships, our work, our homes, our bodies, our commitments and even our own becoming through obligation alone. We can ask what must be done, what should be completed, what the correct way is. Or we can begin to ask what it would mean to stay in relationship with these parts of our lives.

What would it mean to care for something rather than simply maintain it?

What would it mean to meet ourselves where we actually are?

What would change if we stopped assuming that the harder path was always the more committed one?

I remember a Life Skills teacher telling us when we were in Grade 6 or 7, If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.

At the time, I understood it as a statement about finding the right career. I understand it differently now.

Perhaps it isn’t that the things we love never require work. They do. Love does not remove effort. Devotion does not remove commitment. What changes is our relationship to the effort.

There is a difference between working because we are afraid of falling behind and working because we care about what we are building.

There is a difference between forcing ourselves towards an outcome and tending something because we want to see what it can become.

And perhaps there is a difference between discipline that says, I have to keep doing this, and devotion that says, I want to keep finding my way back to this.

That distinction matters because what we repeatedly return to begins to shape us.

Every time we return to writing, we become someone who writes.

Every time we return to movement, we become someone who knows her body through movement.

Every time we return to stillness, we become more familiar with our own inner quiet.

Every time we return to something with care, we begin to store an experience of ourselves there.

And this brings me back to the title of this reflection: you cannot become what you have not taken the time to store.

Becoming is not only about the things we achieve or the habits we manage to maintain. It is also about what we allow to accumulate within us through repeated experience.

We store confidence by experiencing ourselves as capable.

We store trust by listening to ourselves and discovering that we can be trusted.

We store creativity by giving ourselves places to create.

We store softness by allowing ourselves to move through life without constantly hardening against it.

We store devotion by returning to what we love.

These things become familiar because we have lived them.

Perhaps that is why the small moments matter so much. The nap instead of another hour of forcing. The notebook carried somewhere unexpected. The walk outside. The decision to listen to the body before demanding something from it. The five minutes of writing that eventually become an hour because something has opened.

None of these moments may look particularly significant from the outside.

But something is being stored.

A way of meeting yourself.

A memory of what it feels like when the relationship is alive.

A knowing that you do not always have to push to move forward.

And maybe this is what the ribbon was showing me that afternoon.

It was not trying to become anything.

It was simply responding to what was moving through it.

Perhaps devotion asks something similar of us. Not to abandon discipline, but to soften our grip on the way we think something must be done. To remember that the form can change while the relationship remains. To let the river move, and to learn how to move with it.

Because the goal was never simply to write every day at 5 p.m.

The deeper practice was becoming a woman who writes.

And perhaps there is a difference between doing something repeatedly and allowing something to become part of who you are.

That is what I want to remember now.

Not to ask myself only whether I showed up.

But to ask whether I remained connected.

Whether I left enough room for curiosity.

Whether I allowed the practice to breathe.

Whether I was cultivating something I wanted to carry with me.

Because we are always becoming through what we give our attention to.

And what we take the time to return to, again and again, eventually becomes something we carry within us.

Welcome to the Pink Milk Library.

Take what speaks to you.

Leave what does not.

Return when you are ready.

Pink Milk Collective is here, whenever you are ready to find your way back to your natural body rhythm.