Time

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Why is it that — even without the teaching career — even without the three little girls who were underfoot for so many years and now are nearly grown — I STILL feel overwhelmed and as though I don’t have enough time to write?

Because Louise DeSalvo told me to, I have been reading The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. In this book, which is largely for manager-types and salespeople, Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington explain that time is finite:

“It’s important to realize the simple truth that you can’t do it all; otherwise you will continue to labor under the false belief that you will eventually catch up, and finally get to the important stuff. You will continue to use all of your time on the urgent day-to-day activity and postpone the strategic that is required to create breakthrough and, ultimately, the life you desire.” (138)

You wouldn’t think that this would be such a big idea. I’ve encountered it before, and in contexts more relevant to my writing life. But it caught me at a vulnerable moment. And then these sentences, a few paragraphs down the page:

“Reaching a breakthrough isn’t about being incremental. Breakthrough requires a profound change in the way that you work…”

You have no doubt heard before much of what Moran and Lennington say. But their idea of ditching annual goals for 12-week goals strikes me as brilliant. You can still have annual goals, but you have to go through the process of breaking them down into doable 12-week chunks. Instead of writing down for 2015, “Lose 20 pounds, Declutter house; Finish two new books” — which sounds an awful lot like a wish list, rather than goals — thinking in 12-week chunks of time has made me get more concrete in all of my thinking.

If I want to lose 20 pounds this year (ultimate goal: to be radically healthy into my 90s!), how much will I have to lose over the next 12 weeks? And what actions will I have to take this week in order to be on track with my 12-week goals?

To finish my novel rewrite before I take my Florida vacation (which was about 7 weeks out when I started reading The 12 Week Year), what actions will I need to take? This week? Today?

To send the requested 8-10 poems to the journal that requested them by the end of May, what actions do I absolutely have to take this morning, now?

I started by printing up a 12-week calendar that fits on a single, 8×10 page — a planning practice from my teaching days. I had SO much to write into it, that I then made the calendar days bigger and put it on two pages of six weeks each. I divided up the work, leaving myself leeway (I know myself too well to think I won’t need leeway), and planning for Sundays off from writing.

Today, one poem, polished and put in the file to submit. (Tomorrow, another.)

I’ll let you know what happens.

Pearls of Wisdom

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from http://www.sunsetshoesonline.net/index.php/catalogsearch/result/?q=pearl+bracelet

A friend read this aloud to me recently. When she sent me the link to where she had found it, I was delighted to see that its author is Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. 

It appears on the website, Living Life Fully.

-o-

Some of the oldest and most delightful written words in the English language are the collective nouns dating from medieval times used to describe groups of birds and beasts.  Many of these go back five hundred years or more, and lists of them appeared as early as 1440 in some of the first books printed in English.  These words frequently offer an insight into the nature of the animals or birds they describe.  Sometimes this is factual and sometimes poetic.  Occasionally it is profound:  a pride of lions, a party of jays, an ostentation of peacocks, an exaltation of larks, a gaggle of geese, a charm of finches, a bed of clams, a school of fish, a cloud of gnats, and a parliament of owls are some examples.  Over time, these sorts of words have been extended to other things as well.  One of my favorites is pearls of wisdom.

An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable.  Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive.  But oysters must open their shells in order to “breathe” water.  Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.

Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this.  It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel.  It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live.  But it does respond.

Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain.  A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s response to its suffering.  Not every oyster can do this.  Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do not.

Sand is a way of life for an oyster.  If you are soft and tender and must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, making pearls becomes a necessity if you are to live well.

Disappointment and loss are a part of every life.  Many times we can put such things behind us and get on with the rest of our lives.  But not everything is amenable to this approach.  Some things are too big or too deep to do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind if we treat them in this way.  These are the places where wisdom begins to grow in us.  It begins with suffering that we do not avoid or rationalize or put behind us.  It starts with the realization that our loss, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.

Something in us can transform such suffering into wisdom.  The process of turning pain into wisdom often looks like a sorting process.  First we experience everything.  Then one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.

-o-

May 2015 be your best year yet!CAM00323

What Are Your Blocks?

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Photos courtesy of Ron Quinn

“Most of the time when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way.” (Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way, 30)

While composing this post, which was going to be, mostly, a quotation accompanied by a photograph of a logjam, I went on-line to find a good picture, and then I remembered the Lewis County flood of 2007 (7 years ago this week).

It was an epic time for my family. High water combined with timber and debris took out six or seven local bridges, and closed the bridge on Elk Creek road, the road where my parents and other family lived. Although my immediate family did not lose any property, houses of some of my cousins were flooded. The clean-up took months.

My youngest sister was, at that time, the Postmaster in Doty, Washington, and the bridge on Elk Creek road stood between her and home, completely buried in log debris. The back way, through Dryad, had its bridge swept away entirely. She was offered food and shelter, but it had been a harrowing day, and she wanted to be with her family.

Floods are a force of nature, but so is my red-headed sister.

A vehicle couldn’t cross over that bridge, but one could, if determined, climb across. A neighbor in the same predicament said that she’d go, too. Of course by the time the Post Office closed, it was dark, but my sister found a pair of old pants in the Goodwill box at the Doty Pentecostal Church, and, wearing her Clarks, she set out. (I don’t know what kind of shoes the neighbor was wearing.)

The logjam became their road home.

There’s a literary device, aporia, that teaches us this as well. It’s from the Greek (difficulty, perplexity, from aporos, impassable), but one way to think of it is as a signpost pointing the way.

As my friend Thom Lee says of bandaids: they show where the healing needs to occur.

Identifying your blocks is only the first step. Instead of thinking “impassable,” see your block as the very place where you must focus your attention. 

Armistice Day

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So here is Garrison Keillor talking about Armistice Day and reading from some of my favorite writers: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php.

Happy Birthday, Eric.

eric