I put my hand in the cup of coffee instead of the bowl of almonds.
Category: observations/thoughts (Page 6 of 12)
After Christmastime, the church enters what’s known as Ordinary Time, and I feel like my own life this month has entered a kind of “ordinary time” that is very welcome after the ordeals of Christmas and New Year’s.
I don’t mean the normal busy flurry of activity that precedes Christmas or the merriment and unstructured time of the Christmas Octave. I mean my personal ordeals, which included catching a cold that then led to a wicked cough, which then led to back pain and sciatica in my right leg and a stint in the emergency room, and an MRI, and a spinal injection to help ease the pain, and now here I am on nerve medicine, muscle relaxers, and ibuprofen trying to manage the pain and get on with life.
And I am getting on with life. On these days when the kids are all in school, and I can sit at my desk and work, and the house is (relatively) in order, and I know what needs to be done and I have time (and health, enough) to do it, I am content. This is that ordinary time I referenced above, that time when the days pass uneventfully but with satisfaction: a day well done, a life unremarkable but nevertheless joyful.
Weirdly, despite my continued leg pain, I am joyful. I don’t know if it’s the effects of my new Panda Planner (which I can’t believe I’ve become a “planner person,” but I must say, having used the Panda Planner for almost three weeks, I can feel a difference in my organization, productivity, and well-being), or if my joy comes from facing so much physical pain that I’ve had to cling to whatever happiness and peace I can muster in order to stay sane and not despair, or maybe it’s just the medicines I’m taking that are blissing me out, but whatever the cause of the joy, I am here for it.
Maybe it’s the fact that for the past two and a half weeks, I’ve been awake at 6:30 a.m. due to the leg pain, and I’ve used those early morning hours to walk slowly around the house and listen to the Liturgy of the Hours. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time someone has found joy in early morning prayer. Saints and monks can testify to that.
I don’t know if it’s a middle-age thing (since I am officially middle-aged), but I can’t get over how grateful I am for the experience of “ordinary time.” Habit, predictability, the incremental everyday work that builds into satisfying accomplishment: I like the rhythm of it. I like that things seem ordered. Yes, of course, I still have the chaos that comes with raising happy, wild, volatile young children, but that chaos is mitigated by the ordinary beats of ordinary time. There are no big events or holidays ahead, no trips or happenings to plan for. Yes, I still have deadlines and stress, but for this brief respite in January, I can just let myself settle into the regularities of ordinary life.
It’s the ebb and flow. I love the excitement of Christmastime, but now I love the quiet of Ordinary. We need both to have a balanced life.
We are in the midst of a winter storm here in Michigan, though my side of the state has avoided the blizzard designation for now. Instead, we’re in “winter storm warning” mode, praying that our power stays on and the roads are clear for Christmas Eve.
I’ve been trying really hard lately to live in the present moment and not worry about the past or the future, but weather events like these invite a kind of necessity to think ahead. If our power goes out, what do we do? How much gas do we have for the generator? Do we have enough food and water? Do we have batteries for flashlights?
When a big storm hits, we need to plan ahead, so living only in the present moment is risky. It’s foolhardy to never prepare for the future.
I don’t want to be caught off-guard, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the future and making contingency plans. In some ways, I’m being wise. If our power goes out later tonight, we’ll be glad we bought that generator.
But in other ways, my worry about the future is a hindrance. It not only makes me anxious and leads me to catastrophize, but it also makes me miss what’s happening in the here and now.
A few weeks ago, my youngest child was in the midst of a tantrum and I was at my wit’s end. I wanted him to stop screaming, but I couldn’t skip through the tantrum and jump to the calm that always comes in the end. I had to endure the screaming and flailing and acting out. I wanted it to be the future, but I was stuck in the present. We are all stuck in the present like this: stuck in a moment of drudgery or pain or annoyance or helplessness. What we want is to skip ahead. Get to the future. Leave the bad stuff behind.
But I can’t skip over my child’s tantrum, or an illness, or a snowstorm. I have to endure it. And that means I can either think about the future when everything will be better (I hope), or I can accept the present moment in all its agony and move beyond endurance to something approaching an embrace.
This doesn’t mean I’m happy about my child’s tantrum, or the fact that we might lose power from cyclone winds, or whatever other maladies befall me during my lifetime, but even in the midst of these maladies, I’m still here. I’m still alive. Living in the present moment is about living. I’m not embracing the bad as if it’s good, but I’m embracing the fact that I’m alive.
And being alive is good, even in the midst of moments when it’s hard.
It’s a bit hard right now with my whole family cooped up in the house while the winds whip through the trees and snow swirls in all directions. The kids are getting cabin fever, and I’m still worried about what the roads will be like tomorrow for Christmas Eve. The future is making me anxious, but so is the present.
And even though it’s hard, I’ve got to embrace this present moment. It’s frustrating. I’m nervous about the winds. But there are still small moments, present moments, that I can embrace. The sweetness of honey in my peppermint tea. The glow of lights on the Christmas tree. The birds gathered around the feeder, their muted colors of gray and brown, their bright colors of red and white all a flurry of wings and beaks, swarming and scattering the sunflower seeds like tiny pebbles on the hard, smooth surface of the stark-white snow.
I don’t know what tonight will bring, but for this present moment, I’m content.
My writing has been hampered lately by a fear-based mindset. Every time I sit down at the computer to work, I look at my work-in-progress and worry that whatever I write next will be garbage. I’ll ruin the whole story.
This fear is crippling. I know rationally that I can always write a sentence and then change it if I don’t like it. But this doesn’t solve all the insecurities and fears that aren’t rational. It doesn’t address all my doubts.
I sit at the computer and doubt my judgment: Will I have the necessary skill to recognize a bad sentence, a bad plot line, a bad detail? What if my judgment is faulty? What if I write badly and can’t see it? Then I’ll have ruined my whole story. No one will like it. No one will read it. I’ll embarrass myself.
I hate these thoughts. I hate having these insecurities. But it’s very difficult to suppress them. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of them. I’m looking for ways to overcome them, but I’m not sure what to do.
In the past, I’ve used 4thewords to help me get through these doldrums, but the more I used this online writing game, the more I felt like my stories became a means to an end. I wrote not because I wanted to spin a good yarn but because I wanted to earn points and level up in the game. This is an issue with gamification in general: extrinsic rewards supplant intrinsic ones. When I was using 4thewords to get my stories finished, I ended up thinking of my stories as vessels for earning points. What I wrote wasn’t important, it was just the amount that mattered. I needed enough words to defeat a bunch of monsters, not to tell a compelling story.
I stopped using 4thewords because I didn’t like that it was training my brain to write for points. But I can’t deny that it helped me get over a lot of my fears about the blank page. I’m sure it works very well for many writers, but for me, my brain was learning all the wrong lessons.
What I’d like to discover this time around is a way to get over my fears that doesn’t involve gamification or substituting extrinsic rewards for intrinsic ones.
(Side note: I know I probably need to work on figuring out why I have these fears in the first place and put effort into changing my mindset. I’ve tried addressing my mindset in the past, and while I’ve seen some progress in tamping down my perfectionism and imposter syndrome, I’ve not made enough progress to alleviate writer’s block entirely. One of the best strategies I’ve come across is to switch what I’m working on. I’m kinda doing that now, in fact… writing a blog post instead of working on a story. This old switcheroo is great for getting my fingers typing again, but it creates a problem when it comes to finishing things. If I’m always switching projects, I’m never finishing them. This strikes at the heart of the problem: I haven’t truly addressed my fears. Switching projects might help the initial block, but it doesn’t help my overall perfectionism and self-doubt.)
The only strategy I can think of at the moment is to leave my screen behind and switch to drafting on paper. I love writing by hand and do it everyday in my Writer’s Notebook, but when I’m working on an essay, newsletter, or fiction story, I tend to write on the computer. I can type much faster than I can handwrite. If the ideas are flowing quickly, my keyboard is the better tool for getting words down faster.
But the computer screen invites a kind of formality into the process. I don’t know why it does, it just does. I sit at the computer, stare at the screen, and feel like whatever words I type on the screen are THE words. They are weirdly hard to extricate from the story. I know deleting things on the computer is super easy. One strike of the keyboard and whole pages can be swept into nothingness. I know this, but yet my brain sees those words on the screen, existing with all the other words I’ve already written, and it starts to believe that those words are practically published, practically finished and ready for the reader to see.
Maybe I should blame blogging for this development in how my brain works. After all, I type the words into the text field on WordPress, and with one click of a button, they are published to the internet. How could my thinking not be affected after more than a decade of blogging, of composing words on the computer and expecting them to be published with one click?
But my Writer’s Notebook is different. In my WNB, I handwrite everything. I don’t show anyone my notebook. It’s not meant to be published. If I write something in the notebook that later becomes an essay or newsletter or story, I usually change things when I retype the handwritten words into the computer. A word here or there, adding things, cutting things, etc. The handwritten words are for me and me alone. Only when I type them up do I decide they might have merit for another reader.
Because of this habit, I know my brain associates handwriting with experimentation, privacy, and play. Typing is for “professional” stuff. Handwriting is for me. It’s where I go to enjoy myself. Just as typing up blog posts has trained my brain to associate typing with publishing, my WNB has trained my brain to associate handwriting with joy and relaxation.
What I need to rediscover is the intrinsic reward of writing a story just for the pleasure of writing a story. No more points or leveling up. No more typing on the computer always with an eye towards the “publish” button.
What if I told stories to myself, handwriting them on a yellow legal pad or in my Writer’s Notebook? What if I thought only about the fun and experimentation that comes with writing by hand? Will this free me from the pressure to be “good”? To escape the trap of perfectionism that always seems to creep up when I’m typing on the computer?
Whether this is a quick fix or a permanent solution, I can’t say. I do know that when I think about that yellow legal pad, when I imagine myself scribbling words onto it, I get excited. Handwriting means experimentation. Play. Joy. When I’m writing by hand, the pressure is off. Thinking about that yellow legal pad, about the movements of my fingers as the black ink streaks across the page, I suddenly want to start writing the next sentence of my story. I want to see where my hand will take me. The computer screen feels like a closed, sterile room. The handwritten page feels like a wild and winding path.
I’ve subscribed to his newsletter for years(?), and for years I included his excellent book How to Think as assigned reading in my AP Language and Composition course, but I’m always surprised—and delighted—when I rediscover his wisdom and insight by reading his blog.
Thanks to a shout-out from Austin Kleon, I jumped over to Jacob’s blog this morning and read for about forty-five minutes, scrolling through and dipping into the posts that looked most interesting, and reading more than half a dozen fabulous ones, from his thoughts on technology to medicine to reading to writing to politics (“small p” politics), and now I’m on fire with my own ideas and thoughts. Which is what great blogging—heck, great writing in general—often does. It opens up new trails for us to follow, new vistas to see, new tonics to imbibe. These tonics quench dry throats, give us voices to sing again.
Anyway, I hate how I forget to read some of my favorite writers, but there’s such a joy in rediscovering them too. It’s like meeting an old friend in an unexpected place. It’s not a good thing to have lost touch with this old friend, but there’s something wonderfully fulfilling about finding them again. It almost makes up for having lost touch.
Now that I’ve rediscovered Jacob’s blog, I don’t want to lose touch again. The joy in re-finding his blog has given me surprising pleasure, but there’s also the ordinary pleasure that comes from reading a good writer every day. That’s what I’m looking forward to tomorrow.
The reading challenge ebbed and flowed. I don’t know if I really succeeded. Some days I read more than others. Some days I fell victim to my own addiction to surfing the internet. The addiction is deep. As soon as I think I’m master of my attention, something happens to draw me back to the “abyss of Total Noise” that is scrolling the web.
What a perfect metaphor. A web. Like flies, we’re caught.
It’s not that I think the internet is a bad thing. I literally would not have met my husband or developed a career as a professional writer and editor if the internet didn’t exist. I might have met another husband or made a career as a writer in some other way, but not in the way I did. I’m grateful for the internet.
But it is a web. A vast web. And that vastness has been a double-edged sword.
Anyway, the reading challenge was a bit “meh.” I wish I had been better about carving out my reading time. But life — always life — intervenes. Children with broken arms. Emergency room visits. Power outages. Deadlines. Exhaustion.
I suppose I can try again with a new challenge, but is that just setting myself up for another failure? I also made a pledge to blog (nearly) everyday, and that has been a bust as well. So many missing days. Weeks gone by and nothing posted.
Perhaps the better thing to focus on is my persistence. Despite all these setbacks and failures and inabilities to maintain a challenge, I have a stubborn inability to give up. Even as I fail at these challenges, I keep going. Maybe there’s merit in that (or some form of insanity!).
I used an old Austin Kleon prompt today in my writer’s notebook. I can’t find anything on his blog about it, but I know I first got the idea from his writings. Here’s a link to elsewhere that explains the prompt: Spine Poetry.
So, these are the book titles sitting on my desk right now: The Sleeping Dragon, The Broken Lands, The Tolkien Reader, Maps of the Imagination, The Summer Book, The Fall of Arthur, The Once and Future King, The Lore of the Land, The Book of Idle Pleasures, Listen to the Echoes.
And here is my poem made from the titles along the spines:
Listen to the echoes:
the lore of the land,
the fall of Arthur (the once and future king),
the broken lands,
the sleeping dragon.
Maps of the imagination:
the Tolkien reader,
the summer book.
The book of idle pleasures.
