I have always secretly wished I was a runner.
It’s not something I’m willing to make time for in my life right now,
but I like the feeling of running on treadmill and going exactly nowhere, and
knowing exactly how fast or slow its taking to get nowhere. It’s a good meditation. I love the feel of my heart and lungs gasping
and looking at the clock and thinking ten
more minutes. I can do it for ten more
minutes. And unlike writing, which weirdly
enough often feels like I’m not doing anything, running leaves little doubt
that I am in fact perspiring, working my body as hard as possible. When I’m finished I feel like I could conquer
the world. And I’m still standing in
the same spot.
An
hour of writing can go by and it can be a little more difficult to tease out
what exactly you accomplished. There’s
no need to go take a shower and change your clothes, you’re still stuck with
yourself and there’s still more writing to do.
If I've been responsible and carried my notebook and note cards around
with all week, I’ll sit down at the computer and walk away from my session of
2-3 hours with a new poem draft, a revision, a blog post, and maybe a couple
pages of a story. I own the world when
that happens, not as frequently as I wish.
But more often whatever I've accomplished sitting down with my pen or
keyboard is elusive. It can feel like I
haven’t been writing, but when in I check the dates on my documents I discover
I’m writing almost every day. Curious.
Writing
is its own kind of treadmill, without the glory of sweat or a fast heart beat.
Any kind of commitment requires persistence and humility. Persistence to keep p going, even when it
feels like you’re going nowhere at all, and humility to keep your ego in check.
I like to dwell on persistence as opposed to perseverance. Perseverance presumes
success—that if you work your brains out you’ll win. We write because we need to write. We do the
work before us, because it’s what’s needed to be done. A writer friend of mine said to me this
week: I work so hard and I get so many rejections. The rejections don’t
have much bearing on the quality of her work; she writes wonderful poetry. It takes humility to receive rejection and continue anyways.
All
week I've held the words persistence and humility in my mind like stones. I roll them over in my mind not only when I’m
writing, but when I’m going about the tedious business of living. When I’m
looking for the mittens (again), telling Morgan to take a time-out for hitting me (again),
or when I realize that besides my best intentions, we’re going to be late to
the dentist (again). It’s not about
persisting to get what I want (an on-time arrival), but persisting in being
calm and practical and maybe even a
little silly in my endeavor to live life with it’s myriad of complications and
disappointments. And when I falter,
like when I was one large foot-stomping grimace after the time-outs were not working, I roll over the word humility in my mind and start over, try
something different, or maybe just accept the day the moment for what it
is: beyond my control.
To
quote Ms. Stacey from my childhood favorite Anne
of Green Gables: “Tomorrow is a
fresh new day with no mistakes in it, yet anyways.”
You
just got to keep going.
Ah, so well said. I love this comparison, and feel invited to import the meditativeness from the treadmill to the writing place. And, like you, through all the spaces in between.
ReplyDeletelove
Ela
Thanks, Ela...I'm courting the "treadmill" right now. Wishing you well this evening.
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