Practicing Life #5: #back2it and Starting Over Every Day (Sort Of, in a Way)
Meditation:
As prophesied/promised/aspired to, I wrote a lot today. Fiction I mean, not whatever these rambling messes are. I got down around 3k words of a new short story that’ll be hitting your inboxes later this week after some clean up passes. It’s a sort of urban fantasy meets P.I. meets a bit of romance (I can’t not write about love in some form or another it seems).
So, for today I have successfully avoided the trap I mentioned yesterday of thinking slacking off is immaterial. Every word on the page is one word closer to mastery. Again, extrapolate that out to whatever you do. Writing is somewhat easy to quantify and that’s nice. Progress is at least, the time put in, the only variable you can control. The flip side of that is you’re never done. That’s why you start from scratch every day.
Obviously not in terms of whatever your work in progress is. I won’t begin the short story again tomorrow. Obviously, like a relatively sane person, I’ll pick up where I left off and complete it (I hope tomorrow). But mentally and spiritually you start over again tomorrow. You’ve rested and the enemy is waiting. I take a lot of my approach to the craft of writing from Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, which is actually a phenomenal book if you can read through the New Age woo-woo nonsense and adapt the practical lessons to a more reasonable worldview. I probably will write an essay sometime soon(ish) about how I do that specifically. Maybe it will help people get something more out of a book that is both somehow genius and profound and also dumb and silly. But what a book.
Anyway, the crux of that little volume is that there are forces trying to prevent you from doing what you know you need to do. I mentioned that a bit yesterday. And I’m repeating it today, because guess what? Those forces will be there tomorrow, and they will try and stop you from writing, or teaching, or welding, or being kind to people, or getting jacked and shredded, or whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on.
So today I won the battle. Pretty well decimated the enemy forces, I must say. 3k+ days are those mountaintop, inspired moments where everything flows. Someday I hope that’s my normal output. But for now, I just rest in the victory, arm myself for tomorrow, and remind myself that any time you do anything along your chosen life path, you win.
Writing:
See above.
Viewing and Reading:
I didn’t watch anything last night, since I shifted the balance of leisure time to reading. I like films and I think I’ll look into screenwriting someday, but for now that’s a distant thing. One must also avoid distraction (like exploring screenwriting would be for me today), it’s a tool of the enemy.
So writers read, as I and greater writers than me have said. Between last night and today I put another 3-hour dent into that Nora book. A bit past halfway, it’s relatively thick. Enjoying it a lot and I’ll be uploading my book lists soon, so you can see the full rating there along with everything else I’ve read and recommend from the last couple years.
Ciao:
Short and sweet. Back to the keyboard and this new story. I’m hoping you’ll enjoy it and I encourage you to go do that one small thing on whatever your life project is today. See you tomorrow(ish)!
I read it. Fine. Leave me alone now.
It is the liturgy of beginning, of starting over, of trying harder, or at least a little more. A ceremony of recalcitrance defying resistance. It is the ritual grace of repetition, of showing up, again and again and again. This the discipline, the art, the craft, the skill.