A sloppy drum solo
Hello, friends!
It’s gorgeously foggy as I write this, a little past eight Monday morning. Down the slope from Hill House, roughly equidistant between our home and our neighbor’s, are a handful of fruit trees that the previous owner planted. I can hardly make out their branches in the mist.
A good morning for writing.
I haven’t written all that much in the last two weeks. It’s difficult to say why. Perhaps I haven’t wanted to. There’s so much guilt associated with that feeling. But you’re supposed to put your butt in the chair, produce some work on most days. I could, too, pin the blame on shifts in my morning routine. The sun comes up later; it’s raining more often than not now. Morning walks don’t happen; evening walks are looked forward to all day, and then forgotten about. But they’re all just easy scapegoats for my not feeling much like writing.
Awhile back I came across this 12-year-old piece by Susan Piver. In it, she talks about how to get work done without berating yourself into doing it.
If I’m not vigilant about making myself do stuff, I won’t do anything. And my commitment to meditate is critical on every level. I mean, I’m a meditation teacher who writes books about Buddhism. Shame if I turned out to be a phony. And every writing book on earth says you must work at the same time every day, or words will never come. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” says painter Chuck Close. “The rest of us just show up and get to work…” I want to be like Chuck! There has to be another path to spiritual and creative discipline…what could it be?
The answer I came up with? Pleasure. Pleasure! The last thing I usually think of when planning my day. Once I get all my work out of the way, maybe I can do something fun or satisfying or just cuz. I never do stuff just to have fun. Never. I am so not built like that. However…among the most pleasurable things in my life are the things I’m committed to doing: spiritual practice and writing. I love those things! I remembered that they make me happy. Maybe I could just jump into them for their own sake, for the joy of doing them rather than the obligation and it’s possible the whole thing would roll out just fine. Once I remembered that my motivation is rooted in genuine curiosity and that my tasks are in complete alignment with who I am and want to be, my office suddenly seemed like a playground rather than a labor camp.
Joy is easy to forget about in all of this. I wake up in the morning, and I have a window, a slim one, before work begins. The pressure to move the needle can be significant; the need to fulfill personal goals before turning my attention to professional ones can be stifling. When work is done for the day, I’m often tired; the last thing I want to do is sit in my windowless study one second longer, in front of a bright screen.
I’ve been wrestling with some personal frustrations lately. A sort of recurring despair that swamps me once or twice a year, then recedes again. Recently I grew tired of trying to process those feelings in my daily journal; the pages all felt the same, line after line of hard-to-read pencil scribblings, moaning about the same difficulties day after day. I’m not sure what motivated me, but I put down the pencil and picked up a brush pen.
I love a good brush pen. They lay down these gorgeous, deep black lines. But they’re difficult to control. Slim lines are shaky if you’re not moving quickly; fat lines are uneven and blotchy for the same reason. The last thing I wanted at that moment, though, was to produce something clean. I slashed messy dark shapes and lines on every remaining page of my journal, trying to capture what I was feeling without any polish and without any promise of solutions. And I remembered that sometimes the work we do is just about expression, not solution. Being vulnerable, not structured.
That reminds of Robin Rendle’s trick for making things: When you get stuck, switch the medium!
On the rare occasion that I hit a quagmire with a project I remember this one magic trick that’s always hidden up my sleeve (but one I tend to constantly forget and have to find again). It’s this: when stuck, change the medium. So if I’m certain that I’m writing a book, then I should change it into a presentation. Or if I’m making an essay then I ought to record myself saying it out loud. Simply changing the medium is enough to see something for what it really is with the important stuff highlighted right away, and most of the junk obvious enough to spot from a mile off.
So The Dark Age is no longer a novel. Maybe it’s an Instagram post (I’m not signing up for Instagram again, though, so scratch that). Or a rock opera. Or a little driftwood carving. A photograph of Hill House’s foggy view? Who knows! Maybe it’s a drum solo. A noisy, sloppy drum solo…about loss and space exploration.
Perfect!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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