So, this year's plan for maintaining sanity, challenging the mind, and nurturing the soul involves the remembering of these five instructions: dance, write, breathe, walk, listen. More about the second....
2. Write
Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way
encourages her readers to commit to writing “Morning Pages.” If you haven’t
heard about this before, the idea essentially is that when you wake up in the
morning, before you eat, speak, shower, before you start anything, you first
write. This writing isn’t for the purpose of capturing artistic genius. Its
purpose is to make space. In fact, when a notebook of Morning Pages is full, I
chuck it. I don’t even flip through it. It is waste. If we want to get really
crass about it, we could compare it to a good morning poop- it’s all about
moving the garbage along, emptying it out to make room for the new and the good.
Cameron talks about creativity as being more of a receptive process than a
productive process. If you want to be creatively “productive,” she argues, you
actually have to first make space in your head and your heart so you can
receive new sensations, integrate new inspiration, and make sense of what
already is. None of that goodness can root itself if your mind is cluttered.
And this space-making activity is not only for artists or even just for those who
consider themselves to be of the creative persuasion, but for any person whose
daily activities require them to think, process, problem-solve, plan- so pretty
much anyone really.
The wonderful side effect of these Morning Pages is that
if there are things weighing on your mind and filling up your head space and
using up your time and energy with their distracting omnipresence, through the
process of writing about it, many of these issues sort themselves out, or at
least reveal themselves in such a way that you can identify them and articulate
them, in order that you are better able to actually address them. The act of
writing for the sake of writing also validates the importance of process over
product, something I have long struggled with. By simply giving myself
permission to write crap, rather than to write something good or meaningful or
useful, ideas are stirred up and moved along. This writing practice unsticks
thought patterns, both building momentum and bringing a kind of peace. It is
motivational and meditative, grounding and revelatory. And, of course, it
invites me to start my day with intention, to begin with slowness rather than
immediately jumping into the hustle and bustle.
Now, I- surprise, surprise- am not very good at going
about this Morning Pages business on a consistent daily basis. Like most things
in my life, I have these spurts of discipline and commitment, and then I get
tired or overwhelmed and feel like I simply don’t have time to waste on some
sillynilly, non-productive, unnecessary writing. This practice gets lost when I
start choosing the urgent over the important. I anticipate that this will
likely happen again and again and again, or that I will choose the kind of
writing I am doing here and now (though I often quickly forget the value of
this as well) over the writing of Morning Pages, focusing on potential product,
or at least something closer to a legitimate “product,” and forgetting the
connection between the two. Ideally, I’d like to make room in my life for both,
but for now, I’ll just say, without rules or restrictions, that this year I
would just like to write more, whatever kind of writing that may be.
Writing is good for me. I like what happens when I think
through my pen. I like the feeling of moving things out of my head and onto the
page, how the permanence on the paper brings a lightness to my bustling mind
and antsy spirit. I like seeing how ideas shift and grow and move around, how
thoughts that were jumbled and shapeless in my head suddenly become more solid
and clear when written out. I like treating words like ingredients in a recipe,
and noticing how playing with language helps me get to know words in the same way that I know the
spices in my kitchen cupboard- continual practice teaches me which words can go
together and flavour thoughts in new but effective ways. I love the sensation
of witnessing a beautiful sentence show up on the page in front of me, like it
kind of just chose to be there. I like that writing moves me away from denial
and pretense towards a greater level of truth and authenticity. I like the
empathic connection invited by the act of storytelling, whether that story is
told through a letter, a blog post like this, a facebook status update, or a poem
or short story. I’d like to believe that somehow my willingness to try and be as
honest as I know how to be, even if not always as articulately or wisely as I’d
like, might hopefully give others permission to try the same. Writing
facilitates the building of community, the connecting of like minds, the
understanding and appreciation of difference. And if, in the end, all this
writing ends up being just for me, then that also is totally okay, because writing
and posting all this makes me feel just a little bit braver. It requires me to
open myself up to the opinions of others, to risk criticism, and, most
importantly, to get over myself. There’s always this little voice telling me
that bothering with this writing in a public forum where others can actually see
makes me a bit of a narcissistic, self-indulgent try-hard, because it assumes
that others actually have an interest in hearing what I have to say, but then I
tell that little voice to shut up and I do it anyhow, and that is a
soul-growing act in and of itself.
I want to write more snail mail too- postcards and tiny
notes that tell the people I love that I am thinking of them. Too often, I
intend to send my love through the post but then put it off because I want the
words to be perfect and I want to take the time to tell them everything, and since there is never
enough time to tell them everything, I often end up sending nothing. This year,
I want to remember that writing something, anything, is always better than
writing nothing. I want my writing to become both thoughtful and automatic,
where I can grow in this craft in such a way that I finally learn that not all
important messages need to be told with many words. I want to learn how to feel
less tired by the daunting task of making sense of big ideas, that it’s okay to
sometimes leave things unfinished and imperfect, to put pen to page without a
clear vision of what the ending might be. I want to learn how to react quickly enough to capture the flashes of beauty and brilliance that sometimes appear in
my head when I am biking to work or half-asleep. I want to learn how to create
a moment of stillness long enough to hear what’s hidden behind all the blaring
noise.
The key now is to remember this, because every time I
forget, it takes a while to get comfortable again with sitting still, with
reaching in and pulling out, with opening up and waiting for the words to spill
and flow. Like exercise and eating right and praying and all those other things
that are good for me, the starting up again is always a little uncomfortable.
Let’s hope I don’t soon forget.
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