I’ve recently (re) started running. I used to be a runner when I was younger but these days I’m at best a fair-weather runner – many years in the spring I’ll take up running for awhile and work my way up to a few miles at a time, until the summer gets too hot, the winter gets too cold, or I have too many other obligations. This time, for no particular reason, I’ve been increasing my mileage to distances I haven’t run in more than a decade, with little difficulty. When I posted a recent run distance on facebook a friend of mine responded with awe, saying that she “couldn’t even run a mile.” I realized that it helps that I know I can run – both generally, and the kinds of distances I’ve been running lately. In fact, part of what has made my (surprising, even to me) recent running regime work has been, I think, the fact that I haven’t questioned whether I could do it. Each time I go running I run a half-mile further than I ran the previous time. A half-mile isn’t that far; if I can run 8 miles, I can run 8.5 miles. And, relatedly, I don’t wait to see how I feel to decide how far I’ll run – I set out for the specific distance in question, so that’s the plan from the beginning, rather than having to decide whether to run a certain distance when the option of running less is present in my mind. Apparently both determination and obsessiveness run in my family (and in my family running); not only did my father run his first marathon a mere four and a half months after the first time he ran once around the block, but he had a stretch of time years ago when he didn’t miss a day of running for more than two years. His argument was that if you don’t stop to dither about whether you can, should, or want to do something and instead just do it, it’ll happen. So what does this all have to do with music? Well, among other things, my friend’s comment (about not even being able to run a mile) is in part what made me realize that not stopping to agonize over whether I can do something or not is the best way to actually do it. One of the best things for me about all the songwriting challenges I’ve participated in over the last year or two is that I now know that I can write a song – a good song, even – on extremely short notice. That removes the stress of self-doubt that actually increases the ease of writing one, and the likelihood I’ll be able to write a good one. I was thinking about that a couple weeks ago when I was playing another of those collective songwriter shows in which the previous month’s audience gives an assignment to the next month’s songwriters who have to show up with a new song on that topic. The topic I had to write on was “tequila drinks” and since it was the end of the semester I hadn’t even thought about what I would write until the day before the show. But that didn’t stress me out. I had set aside some time in the afternoon to work on the song, and wrote a draft of something I’m quite happy with (there are some placeholder lyrics in a couple places that I’ll probably refine but the concept, structure, and melody are all things I like a lot, along with some of the specific lines). In part that all worked because I know that there are plenty of times I’ve only had a few hours to come up with a song (during February Album Writing Month, or the Fearless Songwriter Challenge) and have come up with fantastic songs. I knew I could do it. And so I didn’t waste time and energy worrying about whether I could, and just got down to the business of doing it.