Forty Days of Acting As If
Although I'm not an adherent of any sort of religious system, I've decided this year to tag along with—or rather, adopt for my own uses—the general Lenten practice of giving something up until the arrival of Easter. In this case, it's a combination of abstention and what I'll call positive additional discipline.
Where the abstention is concerned, very basically, I've decided for the next month or so to refuse to hear the internal critic that tells me I've nothing new to offer under the sun, and/or that what I do have to say is frivolous/unsophisticated/uninteresting/any and more variants thereon. Instead—and this is where the taking on an additional task comes in—I'm spending an hour each evening writing about a large, complicated issue I'm interested in and which I'm reading about, in an effort ultimately to pull together some sort of complete written work—not, of course, by the end of these forty days, but eventually. The writing that takes place during this span of time (and which I've had to force myself half the time to sit down and do) is meant to help me clarify what I'm trying to accomplish, to bring out aspects of my thinking and reading and so forth that I hadn't seen or realized were there, and to get at assumptions that may end up being straight-up wrong or at least partially wrongheaded.
All that to say, I'm doing a hell of a lot of writing (this in addition to the journaling I do every morning as soon as I wake up), so the blog posts here may suffer from attention to those more concentrated efforts that spill out onto notebook paper. Under consideration, too, is whether and how I can or should try to do it all, i.e., churn out semiregular shorter, largely disconnected, posts in an effort to keep in some sort of touch with people—while also attempting somehow to pull together an actual book that I not only finish writing, but that I also like and want to put out into the world.1 Even if I were independently wealthy (oh, the dream!), I'd still only be able to do so much—but since I also have to find a way to feed and clothe and house myself via the exchange of filthy lucre, there's another solid chunk of my day during which I can't devote myself to figuring out where the balance lies.
I guess what I'm asking, friends, is that you send any good vibes of productivity and discernment and determination you've got to spare—and if you've got any favors you can call in with the gods of wealth and/or time and/or energy provision, well—here I am, glad for a bit of that sort of grace to fall into my lap.
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You can subscribe as well via RSS feed.1. It's true: I did not turn my dissertation into a book, because I wanted to bury it and all its adolescent idealism; I realized the novel I completed a few years ago was a sad and scared reach at displaying the right attitudes; and the chapbooks I created out of a series of 1) dreams and 2) train-based travel observations were twisted into styles that were not my own, adopted in order to sound more intriguing or something, but which ended up just being inauthentic. This current foray into being myself in writing and selection of topic/s will at least hopefully get me closer to whatever I'm supposed to be doing with myself in terms of word creation, if not (one can grasp at straws!) in terms of life in general.↩