Control, Acceptance, Openness

I’m thinking about how much and how little I control my weight. I control what I eat and drink, but my weight each morning is removed from the moment of stepping onto the scale, dependant on last night’s dinner, yesterday’s exercise, the water still in my system. These were under my control but not in the moment on the scale.

Contrast my morning weigh-in with things under my immediate control. Say I want to walk 5,000 today tracked on my phone. Right now, I can pace one hundred steps. Immediate effect and entirely under my control.

Will those steps affect tomorrow's weigh-in? Maybe a little. If my weight still trends upward, I can try 7,500 steps or add in other movement, taking control over immediate things and using the scale as a measure of how things work out. Choosing control of immediate things and accepting the mysteries of the larger picture, I might be alright, but this is tough for me to believe in the moment of a weigh-in when the number has gone the wrong way. I need some way to prop up my faith. For that, I remember how this works in writing.

I recently finished my seventh year of Morning Pages, writing three pages by hand every single morning. Some pages are inspired, but mostly they are drivel. They are process and practice rather than product. Once again this morning, I worried that I’m wasting my time, covering the same ground, spewing random thoughts rather than writing something artful. It felt dangerously embarrassing.

It is if I frame Morning Pages as needing to result in brilliance. A better frame is: “sit, write three pages, accept what comes and push for more.” If I show up, do the work, accept what I write and open myself to what might happen, that’s all in my immediate control. In writing, I largely believe in that practice and process. I even believe, mostly, that product will result from it.

Today, after Morning Pages, I fed a page into the typewriter with the goal of filling one page that might become a blog post. I typed two pages and created this. I exerted control by typing a page and accepted what it might produce while opening myself to the possibilities for product. A pretty good balance.

I can likely become healthier through a similar combination of control, acceptance and openness. I control how much I move my body in the moment. I accept that the number on the scale involves factors I have yet to realize. I’m open to what I might be able to do.

If I sound like I really get this, I’ve exaggerated my position. I struggle to show up each morning and accept that as this human’s nature. I fill the Morning Pages. I weigh in each morning. I try to accept what is and I’m really trying to be open to what might be. It is a balancing act for sure and I am out of balance more than I am steady. I suppose that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I might as well accept it, right? Make adjustments in the things I control and be open to the possibility that someday I will be more secure up on the wire on which I have chosen to walk.

Dead Blogs

I just read that blogs are dead, a tongue-in-cheek statement on a running blog. I smiled until I saw the post was from February 2020 and nothing on the blog since. Either blogs really are dead or that writer, heaven forbid, was struck down by the pandemic. I didn't stick around to investigate.

Certainly, this blog has seemed dead. I wrote this on paper and was too chicken to check when I last posted. Weeks? Months? I've lost the rhythm and this post is no promise that things have changed for the better.

I'm looking for blogs because the news is killing me. I won't bore you with the details, but it's mostly the Republicans, damn all of them all to hell. I want to improve my physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual health. The news ain't helping, but since I often turn to the web for distraction, I want blogs that lift me up a little. Blogs though are dead. Everyone moved to social media. Ugh.

On a good blog, it's just a writer and whatever their mind turns to. There's not much of an audience and almost never any money. The possibility of an audience makes a good writer careful and thoughtful. The absence of profit sets the writer free.

Years ago, I was wisely advised to blog about one thing and build a brand. I didn't do it, mostly because I'm obstinate but also because I found other ways to make money and, especially in writing, I like to do as I please.

It's the do-as-they-please bloggers that I want to read.

Austin Kleon — phenomenal blogger — suggest we should write the books we want to read. I want a blog that lifts me up. Nothing hopelessly, endlessly upbeat. Just something that nourishes my mind and soul a little.

Am I writing that blog? I don't know. I'd worry more about it, but I just read that blogs are dead, so I don't think I'll get too fussed.

The Problems With Poetry

The problems with poetry begins with a book of it that might be good but you're not sure. You've read it once. You're reading it again. Lying in bed. Winter only a few stanzas away in the night. You're too tired to read the next poem with all the wondering whether the book is good or not. So you open Mark Strand's Man and Camel, a thing of certain and exquisite beauty. So good it solves all problems. You read six poems. Each a gently impossible wave brought to shore by invisible forces, celestial bodies on elliptical paths. Too much wonder. You need to share these poems with someone who would understand enough to simply sigh and smile at finding the divine on these pages, inside these brief poems, between man and camel. But you don't know anyone who reads poetry. Not that way. And even if you did, they'd prefer some other book. Not that Mark Strand stuff, they'd say. You'd tell them how wrong they are, but the camel has spit all over you and the man has climbed up to ride away. A real poet's exit. The kind of poet you see in your sleep, his book of poetry open on your chest rising up and down, as though pulled by some celestial and poetic force, the other book lying next to you filled with questions a mere mortal such as you hopes someday to answer though the poetic part of you knows you never will. Those are the problems with poetry.

Time & Story Changes

"Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?"

Daylight Saving Time: the clock on the wall is out of sync with the clock inside me, and I don't like it.

Rather than go on about my dislike of clock changes, I'm thinking about the stories I tell myself. Clock time is, after all, just a shared story on which we agree. It gets us to parties and tells us when to leave.

Yesterday, we had one story about time. Today, we're been handed another. Overnight, there was a break that upset me, knocked me off balance. I was used to the old story and still cling to it. I have that habit.

Three years ago, my story had me playing the character of a terribly depressed teacher. The plot grew darker each day. The theme was of a character stuck, unqualified for any other work. It was a tragedy, that story was.

I thought the story was written for me, that I was a character following along, powerless, perhaps helpless. Stories become more powerful as they go on and I felt too far in to even consider breaking with that story.

Story breaks, even small ones, can be tough stuff. It takes me days to adjust to the time change. Climbing free of the main story of my life, well that seemed downright impossible.

Until it wasn't.

The change in time happened suddenly last night, like the flip of a switch. Two years ago, on a weekend morning in January, words suddenly formed in my mind and I wrote them on a page:

"I will quit my teaching job in June."

A new story began. Just like that.

I had considered quitting many, many, many times; dreamed of, wished for, and even planned it; but the old story rolled over any ideas I had for writing a new one. Two years ago, through some mechanism or good fortune I still don't understand, one simple sentence broke two decades of story in which I had been stuck. Poof, like magic. A new story was begun.

After that, came the slow work of writing the new story. I told my wife. I told my daughters, brother, mother, friends, and colleagues. I began creating a character who no longer believed in being stuck at that terrible school though he didn't yet know what else to become.

Mostly, I accepted the responsibility of writing my own story. That sounds great, but it is also a burden. There are times when it's easier to play along in a story being written for me. But all those stories turn out to be tragic.

I still have stories to break down and rewrite, stories I tell myself about love and family, work and opportunity, health and growth, and on and on. Just noticing that I'm the writer of those stories helps remind me that I can move them and myself in new directions.

The clocks have changed. It's 9:41, not 8:41. I didn't get to decide that one, buy my story continues to roll out onto the page in blue ink from the pen held in my hand and as for the story of what time it is, Chicago was right to wonder why anybody cares.