Morning Pages: Good Times, Bad Times

There will be mornings when life intrudes and you have to made decisions. These are the days that will test your system and shape it. They are bound to come. I'm having one this morning.

I'm at the kitchen table instead of my basement office. It is ten past eight instead of ten past five in the morning. I'm home late instead of going into my job. My younger daughter is asleep on the pullout couch instead of her bed. Yesterday she stepped on a board through which protruded two inches of drywall screw, an inch of which she drove through her shoe and the tender flesh of her foot. This all happened before seven last night. She, her mother, and I were came home from the emergency room close to one in the morning, all of us worn out, one of us still in a lot of pain. We made her as comfortable as we could on the pullout couch, my wife fixed up a terrible bed for herself on the love seat, I got out my computer and wrote lesson plans for a substitute teacher to give my class and then went to bed. It was after two before I slept.

This morning my wife and I were up before seven, groggy and stunned from all that had happened. A child's trauma becomes a kind of trauma for the parents and though this is minor compared to some of what I saw and heard at the hospital last night, it is still troubling and has knocked us off balance and out of our routine. No surprise. I came downstairs, emptied the dishwasher, but then instead of making coffee and taking it to the office with my pen to write Morning Pages, I picked up things in the kitchen, looked over the discharge papers, made a list of what I would need to do today to care for our girl, paid a bill that would soon be due, and tried to keep quiet enough to allow her to sleep. I greeted our older daughter and talked quietly with her, watched my wife get her work things together, scooped the litter, did whatever else seemed to need to be done. Other than my Morning Pages.

Getting out the computer, I opened my email and composed a message to family and friends telling the story of the night before. It took time to remember everyone to whom I needed to send the message. I wrote it, edited and revised it, then hit send. My first written words of the day were typed and not three pages long.

My older daughter caught a ride with a friend to school. I hugged her goodbye and watched her go. My wife packed her lunch and then said she was taking the dog for a walk before having to go to a training an hour away. I had expected to be walking the dog, but she insisted and took the dog with her outside. My younger daughter slept on in the den and I went to my living room desk, took three sheets of paper and my pen from there, brought them to the kitchen and sat down to write my pages.

Morning Pages are always the first thing I do each day and certainly the first writing of the day, except when they aren't. That happens only two or three times a year now for me. Over time doing my pages has taken precedence over almost any interruptions save emergencies of which I'm blessed to have very few.

Had I still been busy with the emergency this morning instead of just tired from dealing with it last night, the writing would have been pushed back. Still, even as I pushed it and dealt with the emergency I would be on the lookout for a time to begin writing. I see these things as breaks in the routine but not disruptions of the system, the way in which I now live. The process is resilient. It can withstand interruption. When my wife said she was taking the dog, my time was upon me and I started immediately. The process resumed. I went toward the comfort of Morning Pages.

In times of trouble I use the pages for reflection, solitude, peace in the storm, a return to normality. I wrote every day following my father's death. I wrote throughout my wife's cancer treatments. That's not moral fiber or dedication, so much as a selfish need to provide myself with the therapy of pen, paper, and routine.

There is no obvious, immediate return on writing three pages this morning. I'm more tired than when I started. My daughter's foot is still injured. There are still so many things to do. I wrote near the end of the third page the following: "I've maybe produced a draft of something for later, but who knows? And if someone cares about that, it isn't me. I'm in it for the long haul and to keep the process going come hell, high water, or drywall screws."

I keep to the daily habit, even when life intrudes and gets in the way. Good things come from that eventually. Some days almost right away.

Isn't It Romantic?

Alan Jacobs is a good thinker. In this post he's describing the decline of baseball's enjoyment as the game becomes much more efficient and business like. This is Moneyball, pure and simple. Jacobs isn't demanding that Major League Baseball go backward, and he doesn't use this word, but I bet he'd be okay with a lot less business and a return to romance.

I was reminded of this New York Times piece by Tim Wu, "The Tyranny Of Convenience" in which he questions the notion that convenience is even a good thing. I like that he uses the word tyranny in that title. Again, we sacrifice romance for convenience, profit, and efficiency. In the process, more often than we might like to admit, we lose.

Romance? Really? That's what we're after?

I know, I know. It sounds hokey, but consider for a moment the best things in our lives and they will all have to do with romance and romantic notions. All our higher order ideals are romantic, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality. Jacobs is admitting that players, owners, and the league itself are all within their rights to want more money, but there's nothing romantic about that idea. Wu understands the desire and need for convenience, but the romantic idea it would free us from drudgery and lead to utopia is belied by the convenience of email, texting, and Slack. No romance there and certainly no utopia.

Yesterday I wrote about my desire to be a writer. Not a teacher who writes or an anything else that also rights, but a writer. There might not be money in it and the process will be inconvenient as hell for my family. But I'll tell you one thing: it's romantic as all get out and I'm in love with that.

Becoming

Hardly anyone thinks this will work. Ever since I've said that I'm quitting teaching, or at least quitting my teaching job, a steady stream of people have asked what I'll do next. When I'm feeling brave, I say I want to be writing. More often than not, I hear that there's no way it will work.

I understand what they're thinking and feeling because I often think and feel the same. I've been writing on the side for forty years. Longer really. Lately I write while teaching at-risk kids in a job that's killing me. Once upon a time I wrote while doing middle school. The idea of doing writing primarily, well, that sounds crazy to me too.

It also sounds so good.

The last couple weeks I've been saddled with even more trouble on the job than usual. I haven't slept well. I'm eating and drinking poorly. Writing has been a struggle. But I'm not stuck with these things. I have all sorts of choice. That's why I'm quitting the job. It's a first step toward doing something better. And I'm noticing that even when writing is hard, when I feel like I can't say anything well, it's good work that I want to be doing. That might change, but it has been true for four decades. I should pay attention to that kind of information.

Most of my troubles spring from not doing things that inspire me. Sure, it's unlikely that I can make a living wage by writing, but I'm much less likely to want to drive my car into Onondaga Lake. And yeah, I know that I haven't figured out what it is that I want to be writing, what exact story I have to tell, but I feel alive when trying to tell it. I need to chase that.

Maybe writing will make me some money. Maybe it won't. But what the hell? There's only one life given to each of us. I might as well try living it.

Let's Not Forget The Fun

I wrote 500 words kind of about the Astrohaus Freewrite Traveler, a device that emulates the best of a typewriter (distraction-free writing, no real editing, no online connections). The piece was a continuation of some discussion I had with the guy who makes Writer: The Internet Typewriter which is the best distraction free writing tool online. I like the Traveler but it's expensive and needs a better editor, one like Writer. These aren't the only reasons I'm not buying one, but they are up there.

Here's the thing: the 500 words I wrote were done on my 1938 Corona Sterling manual typewriter that I had restored at Mohawk Typewriter. Typing with a great manual typewriter with a blue ribbon onto blue copy paper is simple and wondrous joy.

The piece I wrote would have to be retyped on the computer or scanned and fed into an OCR program in order to be shared online. Instead, it's a sheet of single-spaced typing sitting next to me here as I type this. It is mine and mine alone. It will likely stay that way. What an odd and lovely concept.

I wrote those 500 words for no other reason than I wanted to think through some ideas on the page. I think best in written word and I'm happiest when words are appearing on the page at the touch of my fingers. These words on the screen are good (especially because I'm typing them in Writer), but it's nothing like the pleasure of the typewriter or the smooth movement of a fountain pen over the page. That's the good stuff.

My work now is to find ways to move forward as a writer, maybe to make some money doing this work. Still, there's nothing better than enjoying the work, savoring the process, and loving the mechanics of making words on the page. When I'm forgetting those basics, I return to the typewriter and produce an artifact that is clear evidence of joy and reminds me what this is all about. And I write on.