Reflections

I have always written.  I started keeping journals when I was in grade school and I kept paper journals clear on through college and beyond.  And I didn't keep them.  It was not for edification or for some other reason than that was the medium through which I processed life.  And then there were the blogs...oh the blogs.  So much weird, wandering writing just sitting out there with no one looking at it.  Same purpose.  There is something to be said for sitting down and just thinking something through.

And then I wrote a dissertation, a process that completely changed my interior life.  Always an avid reader, I found myself shying away from that place of imagination; fantasy, fiction, and just the simple act of reading before bed all at once left me cold and, oddly, restless.  Similarly, always an avid writer and content with no audience but myself, my writing style and the process of it became stilted, rigid, and uncomfortable.  Words on a page, whether written by me or someone else, became restless and uncomfortable.  Imagine my loneliness (and other readers can and will).  What once was such a joyful space had transformed into something full of anxiety and unrest.

As I was wrestling with this the other day, forcing myself to read before bed (and actually winning that battle thanks to a series my friend Paul turned me onto by Andrea Camillieri, who is a man, by the way), I began to think that just like every other habit, reading and writing again are things I can cultivate.

But I have to try.  And I have to be willing to stick with it for awhile.  And I have to re-orient myself to that space and discover again that it, in fact, is not something to be endured, as writing had become for some many years in recent past, but that it can be and should be the chosen expression of one's best self, especially someone who revels and fascinates on the world of ideas.  

So I've been trying to figure out how, exactly, to go about this and sometimes when one asks, inspiration gives one a break and responds in very obvious terms.  There is a movement in writing called NaNoWriMo, which is a collective promise that writers make to themselves and others that in the month of November they're going to write a certain amount of words everyday for a certain total at the end of the month.

Obviously, I'm late to that bandwagon but inspiration told me that I should do this instead: 

Reflect on the same theme every day for the entire month of December.  If successful, do the same thing on a new theme for January.  Don't think farther ahead than January.

It actually spoke to me that exact way and it was so simple and straightforward that I'd be remiss not to take heed.   So that's what I'm going to do.  I attempted this only half-heartedly in November, trying to reflect on "less" and I nailed it in spirit as I only wrote four things of very dubious quality.  BUT, I'm going to take the last weeks of November here to get ready for December and I'm going to do the same with "less" for the rest of November.  There are no other rules except that I have to write something every day which is not a rule but instead a commitment.

I am very curious to see what happens.

And I am contemplating on asking others to try doing the same and seeing what happens then.  I've already got the December theme picked out.  I can wait to reveal it.  It'll be something I've never really thought about before.