Energy & Enthusiasm

I just didn't have it today. Try as I might, I just couldn't muster much energy. Instead of running or even jogging, I mostly slogged and grimaced. I'm typing this in the backyard. Across the lawn in the sun lies my dog who just rolled onto her back, growled, and shimmied her back into the lawn as much in ecstasy and satisfaction as any being could ever be. She remains on her back, still now, paws splayed out to either side, head turned into the grass, belly soaking in the sun. It seemed to use up all her energy that back scratch and now she's done for the hour. That's about how I feel minus the ecstasy.

At least I'm writing.

Last week, with whole days of time open to me, I was out running for two hours, then back home reading a book, but I couldn't work up the energy or enthusiasm to write. I wanted to be writing and even got the computer out a few times, but there was nothing that I had to say. Everything felt boring, self-centered, worthless even to me. This presented a problem. I have this blog and try to publish regularly enough that I can put out a newsletter once a week to thirty subscribers. I felt the obligation of it all, but there was just nothing in me to say. It just wasn't there. I couldn't gin anything up either. I worried about it, then remembered that my subscribers aren't paying anything and let it go. I posted a note to everyone that I was taking a hiatus and felt better almost immediately.

Energy and enthusiasm are odd things. I'm going to turn fifty soon and my body has changed over the years as you would expect. A few months ago I decided to get into shape and then did something strange given how many times I've made similar decisions: I worked at it. I've been running a bunch and have changed some of how I eat. I need to run a bunch more and change more of what I eat, but I've made some progress. Each morning I have all sorts of energy for eating well. By seven in the evening I want to eat cake. For a few months I resisted that urge and thought it through. You don't really need food, I'd tell myself. You're just bored and think you want to eat. I had enough enthusiasm for the project that I listened to that calm and rational voice. This last week, instead, I've listened to the voice which demonically shouts, GIVE ME COOKIES NOW! That voice is energetic and enthusiastic as hell.

Out on the run today I wondered what was happening. I just had nothing in the tank. I had slept in this morning, eaten two homemade bean burritos, and the weather was perfect. I had only run 6.65 the day before and 10.2 the day before that with two rest days prior to that long run. I should have been feeling good and ready to go. I accept that the first mile might be a bit stiff and uncomfortable, but then I expect to loosen up. Maybe my body did even if it didn't feel like that, but my mind never got into the run. Not even a little.

Throughout the run I tried to figure out what was happening, but now that I'm done I'm trying to decide if I was physically sapped or if I'm mentally and emotionally drained. I don't major in depression and I'm not even sure I minor in it, but I have certainly strung together a concentration in it and know that I progress through a wave emotionally. I wrote once about how it's like the Sine curve from math. It varies between one and negative one, not too high, not too low, and I move through the curve up and down on a semi-regular period. I've been on the upside for about two weeks. This doesn't mean I'm always happy or even constantly content, but that I'm more content than discontent. My depressions, if they can even be called that, are usually shallow but sometimes stick around for a week or two at a time. The darkness is not so deep, but it's there and tough to wade through.

My guess is that most of what I felt today was a touch of depression sucking away some of the energy and enthusiasm I might have felt for the run today. The depression is in my head but it is also in my legs and arms, the beating of my heart, the accordion of my lungs, and most every nerve in my body. I wasn't feeling it today out there on the run. I was feeling something else. I could fight it, but here's the thing I'm understanding more and more with each passing day: fighting is a fast way to losing while acceptance simply takes me through to the other side of the curve and back into the light.

Never Write In The Second Person

You've got to show them something. It isn't as if the deadline is breaking news. You've been thinking about it for weeks, panic settling in like sand falling through the hour glass, running out of the top, the bulb almost empty, falling down in a pile that seems as if it's burying you. All you have to do, you tell yourself, is write something. Almost anything will do. Except you don't really believe that last bit. It has to be good. Or maybe it just has to be good enough. It has been weeks since you've written good enough. 

It isn't that you haven't tried. You've got beginnings, half a dozen of them, maybe more. You've even got a big idea to write about—more than one—and it should carry you through. It should work. You can imagine reeling it off in one big push as you so often have. You're set to go. You know the routine. You sit down, committed, and you work it through. But eight hundred words in—sometimes sooner, sometimes later—you run out of steam, hit the wall, peter out, or whatever you're calling it today when you push back from the computer staring at the blinking cursor. You wonder how that cursor can beat like a heart when clearly the draft is dead. You take your own pulse, curious if you've still got one. You count it off to see if it's racing or slowed to a lethargic rhythm. It feels like the sort of thing you need to know. 

When you get up from the desk and walk away, your thoughts turn to the idea of writer's block. Why not? It seems the most likely diagnosis, but you hate the idea of it, have denied its existence for years. Writer's block, you've said, is a crutch for writers too lazy to work through doubt. It is choosing not to write when the going gets tough. Hypochondria, that's what you've called it. Sure, you've experienced droughts, dry periods of desperate frustration, but you've come out of them every single time. Every one. The piece always comes and you find again the easy rhythm. There's no such thing as writer's block. You remember saying that. Worse, you remember believing it. 

But you remember too the sure feeling that you're not coming out of it this time, kid. That feeling wipes out the knowledge that these moments of inability pass. Or maybe it doesn't wipe them out so much as leave you wondering, is this time different? You have thoughts such as nothing kills you until something does. This, you think, might be the time you're blocked for good. You're washed up.

As a kid, you could pull things off at the last minute. You could write the essay in homeroom or at quarter to two the morning it's due. You threw so much energy at it things just worked. How much energy do you have now? There are your kids and spouse, your job and bills, and your car won't start. You're too old for all-nighters and youthful enthusiasm. Your best days are behind you, of that you're sure. 

Still, there's that good idea you've been chewing on for months. It's not even in your head so much as somewhere deeper. For a moment you smile, thinking the idea is up ahead of you, that it's just not time for it to come out and all you have to do is be patient. Let the clock take you there. 

Lot of good that does you with this deadline. But you admit, quietly, it feels a little better thinking this way, feeling that the idea really is good and coming to you, that you may still be up to writing it. You know too that you're the only one who can ever write it. 

"But I've tried," you say and can hear that you're whining. You try to sound grown up as you explain the number of drafts that have died a few hundred words in, but you still sound like a child who has dropped his ice cream and would rather cry than get another. Embarrassed, you sigh and wonder if this is the sound of acceptance. You hope so. 

You're weighing a simple, binary decision: write or don't write. You're either can or can't. You either will or won't. Whatever you decide, the world will likely keep spinning in the same direction and speed as if your decision didn't matter at all. Make the deadline, miss it, half-ass your way through. How much, you wonder, does any of it matter? 

It matters to you.

You want to show them something. You want to get through. You want to stop worrying and whining. How can the movement of a pen or the tap dance on a keyboard save you? Seems impossible. But you pick up the pen and put it to the paper. You open the laptop and type. 

Just so long as you never write in the second person. The rest of it, you'll figure out as you go along. 

Writing And Not Writing

At writer's group yesterday I mentioned that I hadn't written anything last week. It was so tough that for the first time in nineteen weeks I didn't publish a newsletter. "I just couldn't write anything," I said. "Not even your Morning Pages?" Lauren asked. "Well," I said, "of course I did those." David gently mocked me: "So you wrote twenty-something pages, but didn't write anything."

He's wrong and right here. 

There is a difference between writing and writing. It's possible for me to write twenty-something pages but not write anything at all. Including what I typed, I probably wrote 10,000 words last week, but I still claim, without irony, that I didn't write anything at all. 

Doing Morning Pages is a way to stay in the rhythm of writing. So too is time in my notebook filling pages, running my pen dry. Work at my laptop is the same. I keep myself in the act of writing though I'm not producing any writing. 

I suppose I should articulate the difference.

The first writing is forming letters, words, paragraphs on the page or screen. It is the art of practice, like taking jump shots in the driveway after dinner. There's no score, no audience, no opposing team. It's just jump shots. Writing is like that. I did my usual amount of that kind of writing last week. 

Writing is done with intent to go beyond the narrow confines of my mind. It is reaching out and risking rejection. Writing is done to share with an audience out in the world. 

Even with the intent, not all attempts at writing work. There are writers who claim writer's block when it's not working. Others claim writer's block keeps them even from the rhythm writing. This is where I call bullshit. Maybe not on other writers, but on myself. I can always write no matter how long it has been since I've done any writing. I can keep the rhythm going. My next jump shot isn't dependent on the outcome of the previous jump shot. Just keep writing.

Right now I'm writing and writing. I'm keeping up the rhythm with intent. I can't know for sure what kind of writing I'm doing until I finish. Writing with intent is no guarantee, but it sure as hell makes writing more likely.

Either way is good. Sure, writing is more satisfying, especially when it brings acclaim, but writing, the desperate maintenance of rhythm might be more noble. It's the act of kindling a flame when everything is damp and the process seems hopeless. The product of that kind of writing, kept in a drawer forever or maybe just in memory, becomes a touchstone, a comfort. Often that is just what I need when I am struggling as an ordinary writer but still dreaming of becoming a writer. 

Just Do Something

My mother gave Stephanie a plant for Mother's Day. A hibiscus with lovely yellow blossoms. It came in the usual plastic pot and needed to be planted along the fence, an operation requiring a spade, some soil, water, and a few minutes of my time.

It languished on our patio in the plastic pot almost a month. The wind kept knocking it over so by today only half the soil remained and the plant looked sad, a little desperate. I may be anthropomorphizing here, but go with it. 

I hadn't planted the thing because, though logic clearly showed it would be the easiest of tasks, it always seemed like something I didn't want to do right then. I would get to it later. 

Later and later it turns out. 

Tonight, I came to sit on the patio and the plant was tipped over again. More soil had spilled out. Its lone blossom looked like Sally Struthers begging me to help feed needy children. Alright, I told it. I'll plant you. 

It took twelve minutes from decision to putting the tools away. 

Last week I had trouble writing anything worth posting. I had ideas but no faith in them or myself and left each one unfinished. 

Nike says, just do it, but Nike cripples thousands and thousands of runners and bilks people for the right to wear the swoosh, so screw them. 

I just need to do something. Almost anything. Though you already knew this, I had forgotten it. Write something. Plant something in the ground or type it on the screen and see what grows. Just do something.