Me and My Inertia…

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“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” ― Richard Rhodes

I’d like to say that it’s fear that stops me from writing. Fear sounds so BIG, so sort of cool. Oooh, I caaann’t! I’m afraaaid! I can pretend I’m that cute girl in the scary movie, the one running through the forest in high heels. Epic fear.

But I’m not really sure that it’s fear that gets in my way. Vague, incoherent fears perhaps underlie my awesome ability to procrastinate, my inspiring lack of the ability to prioritize, my death-defying grip on inertia. But what if it’s just inertia?

And this, of course (I admit), from someone who does get quite a bit of writing done. Feeling overwhelmed by life and its demands this summer, however, I have not been getting writing done. Which is not to say I haven’t read 30 novels and played many, many games of Spider Solitaire.

At the end of my life, I don’t want to see a ledger with one side all weighted down with great TV shows, great novels, and great card games. I’m not alone here (I’m pretty sure, as I have also been closely observing three 21-year-old women all summer). So, how many hours do you spend watching television or playing games on your very-smart cell phone — or both?

At the end of your life do you want to say, I meant to … fill in the blank with whatever it is for you (get healthy, quit smoking, lose weight, spend a summer on a sailboat, learn to play the piano, write a book)? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could say you’ve done those things? Were you afraid to do them, or did you just never get started? Getting started is easy, and you can practice getting started, every day, even if all you have is 5 minutes or (my favorite) 15…

I know, I know, when you’re overwhelmed with life, changing your life does not feel like an easy thing. What’s that old saying? When you’re up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember that your job was to drain the swamp.

It’s time for me to reread Virginia Valian’s essay, “Learning to Work,” which is, courtesy of Theo Pauline Nestor, available on-line, here: http://writingismydrink.com/learning-to-work/

My empty office…

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CAM00313~3Leaving my tenure-track teaching position at Everett Community College is right up there with the most difficult things I have ever done. Today, at my husband’s insistence, we drove up here with a stack of empty boxes and we cleaned out the remaining files. I kept quite a few. I tossed quite a few. I kept finding bundles of student letters (my creative nonfiction students wrote a self-reflective letter, to themselves, at the end of each quarter and turned it in with a self-addressed envelope; I have now sent all of them back — sorry for the delay!) and those had to be dealt with. I wrote notes on the first batch, and then gave up and just stuffed them in envelopes and put them in the mail.

In Thinking Like Da Vinci, Michael J. Gelb advocates writing lists. So here’s my list of the most difficult things that I’ve done in my life.

  • Adopting my daughters–especially the first adoption, which came on the heels of a failed adoption and was, thus, emotionally fraught, but the second one, too, when it really seemed (at age 43) that I was too old for a newborn.
  • My Ph.D.–particularly the writing of the dissertation. Exams were right up there, too, now that I think about it. I remember feeling as though a committee member might lean forward and say, “Isn’t your dad a logger? Aren’t you working class? Why are you here?”
  • Leaving my restaurant career…
  • Getting married, and staying married… (let’s just leave it at that).
  • My decision to get an M.F.A. rather than a teaching degree (despite my husband’s opposition).
  • My dad’s death in the summer of 2010.
  • My mom’s illness this summer.
  • I can definitely put “parenting teenagers” on the list, though parenting my twins as preschoolers can’t really be topped for difficulty.
  • Writing a novel and seeing it…almost…through to completion.CAM00264

What I notice when I look back over this list is that I wouldn’t give up one of these, that I am, in fact, grateful for them. The really hard things, it turns out, are the things that have made my life my own. (I’d rather my dad were still alive and my mom, still healthy, but would I choose not to be present with the death of a loved one? To not be there now for my mom? No thanks, I’d rather be present.)

I remember a poet some years ago–this was at the University of Washington back when I was on the Watermark Reading Series committee–telling us that when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she told herself, “I am going to survive this, and I am going to write about it.”

I have mixed feelings–still–about leaving my college teaching job. But I already know that I am going to survive it, and I am going to write about it. The two things are (for me, at least) intimately related.

So, what are your hardest things? What’s the hard thing that you’ve been putting off doing?

 

 

 

 

 

Reading List…

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trees3One of the things I do lately is drive from my home in Edmonds, north of Seattle, to Olympia, to Chehalis, to Olympia, and home again. One of the things I do when I drive is schlep books around. One of the books I’ve been schlepping around (schlepping? is that right?) is Christina Baldwin’s Life’s Companion.  Here’s a passage I copied out in my own notebook (in it, she discusses the work of John Brantner, a professor at the University of Minnesota):

“Even though we have been told by saints and sages that there is a dark night, that we will lose ourselves in the woods, we may still be shocked and surprised to find ourselves there. It is part of human nature to hope that spirituality will save us from the experience, that we can combine enough luck and faith not to suffer.

“In Brantner’s worldview, not only is this not possible, it’s not desirable. He defined despair as an integral part of human maturity, an avenue of learning that should not be avoided….Despair is such a nearly universal experience among people who have chosen consciousness that you and I would do well to accept it, name it, and prepare ourselves as willingly as possible to submit to the process. ” (93)

Then, from Madeleine L’Engle, this:P1050357

“The world tempts us to draw back, tempts us to believe we will not have to take this test. We are tempted to try to avoid not only our own suffering but also that of our fellow human beings, the suffering of the world, which is part of our own suffering. But if we draw back from it…, [Franz] Kafka reminds us that ‘it may be that this very holding back is the one evil you could have avoided.’

“The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.” (Walking on Water, 68-69)

 

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

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Twanoh State Park

Monday and I’m home, in my cabin, about to plunge into some writing.

But first, to tell you about my weekend.

I had a busy weekend. My three girls (all three!) went to Hood Canal with me for a family weekend. We camped at Twanoh State Park Friday night, and though we couldn’t get a campsite beyond that, it was worth all the trouble to set up, even for one night. We had a campfire and campfire food; we had a babbling brook right outside our tent. We had amazing, moss-hung trees overhead, and Hood Canal shimmering nearby.

On Saturday my sister hosted a family garage sale in nearby Allyn, Washington. My sister from Idaho was there, along with two of her kids, their spouses, and her two adorable grandchildren. My other sister’s oldest daughter and her family (more adorable children) were there. My girls and I had brought a whole box of children’s books to sell. I think I made $2 from books, but I was able to give a whole bunch of them away to my little great-nieces. I brought home more stuff than I took.

My nephew Kyle and his wife taught me to play Banana-grams. My brother-in-law not only cooked and cleaned and only talked a very, very little bit about Rush Limbaugh (“He said that you liberals would say he was crazy!”), but he also
gave me a bottle of Duck Pond Chardonnay. It was a great visit with everyone. One of our cousins dropped by — a cousin I hadn’t seen in years and years. Decades.

On Sunday we had a big dinner (more cooking and cleaning for the b-i-l), pictures, etc. There were, of course, lots and lots (and lots) of family confabs about my mom and what will happen next with her care.

I keeptrees asking for a crystal ball (re: my mother’s future), and though no one has delivered one yet, I am getting more clarity. Mom has lost a lot, the use of her left side, enjoyment of food, mystery novels, family dinners. Short term memory. But when you walk into her room, she sits up straight and her whole body seems to light up. She
may not remember your name (or she may) but she remembers you and it is a great pleasure, obviously, for her to see you.

My job is to pay attention. And to keep writing.

I guess a blog post is writing.