Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one’s sympathy the gloom of somebody else.”

—Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Today’s quote from Isak Dinesen—”I write a little every day, without hope, without despair”—strikes me as great advice. Not just for writing, but for living. I can see why Raymond Carver liked quoting it so much.

The thing is, though, it’s extremely difficult advice to follow. Much of the time life seems to take us—creative people as well as “normals”—on a crazy seesaw of hopes and disappointments. Our expectations and wants get us muddled as we try to do the tasks before us, and when we can’t meet all those desires and self-imposed goals, we fall into fits of despondency, think ourselves failures. The inner harpies of self-criticism kick in big time then. They rend and claw without mercy.

For creative people, this extends to and is magnified by the work we do. All creative work is a risk, a thing considered unnecessary by the larger world. There are so many layers of perceived failure available for us to choose from and beat ourselves up about. Creative people seem inevitably to go there, but it’s never a helpful place. It does us no good, it does our work no good.

So…without hope, without despair. Just you and the work. Just me and the work. A little every day, without expectations and the larger-than-life burdens we pile upon ourselves. Maybe this isn’t a recipe for the “current publishing environment,” but it is a recipe for doing the work when it feels like you just cannot. It’s a method of moving forward, even when the mudslides flow around your knees. It’s a practice that keeps the insanity at bay, the practice of doing the best you can with each day, and cutting yourself some slack about the other stuff.

When the harpies start piercing and biting, as oh ye gods they inevitably will, throw them a scrap of hope to gnaw on. Let them chew on that as much as they like so they stop distracting—because we don’t need it at the moment of creation any more than we need the despair.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I wasn't going to do a year-end post because I wasn't sure I had a good way to encapsulate what went on with me this year. But, as so often happens, sartorias showed me a way into the subject. So, thanks Sherwood. :-) As they say in the disclaimers, she is not in any way responsible for the misuse I put her prompting to.

What did you learn this year? she asked her blog readers.

"Everything and nothing," I wrote in the comments. "Outwardly, my life is still boringly the same, but I did some important shifting internally. Too much to encapsulate—or, at least, most of it is ongoing and hard to encapsulate. But the most important two, the ones that I can make out through the fog: learning to let go, and learning not to give up. I mean, really learn, internalize, not just give mouth space to."

I don't mean to sound preachy here. That's not at all my intent. Mostly I'm reinforcing for myself what I've learned, reminding myself. Because you can't reinforce lessons learned enough—at least I can't. They have a tendency to slip away from me, even after I think I've got them.

I learned this year that sometimes when you let go of something—really, honest-to-G(g)od(dess) let go—you release it into the Universe, and sometimes, sometimes the Universe calls your bet and sends it back to you in a new and improved form. I learned that sometimes the things we want most, even things we've spent years yearning for, are not the most important things. In fact, sometimes we're denied getting them in direct proportion to how much we want them. They begin to control us, our thoughts and actions, our worldview, and nothing should have that kind of power over us.

But letting go...oh my Great Golly, that's the hardest part. Getting to a place of Non-attachment to something we've focused so much energy on feels near impossible. There's a lot of pain involved in that struggle, and I could no more give you a step by step analysis of how it works than I could fly backwards around the moon and do a pirouette on the head of a pin. Mostly, I think, it's a question of going into the darkness, living there for awhile, and crawling back out again.

"Use your dark times," a wise friend once told me. "Don't run from them. Don't live with them. Let them tell you what they have to say, then walk away." Sometimes not always easy to do in practice, and if you need help walking away from them, take it. But I'm not someone who thinks we need to run from unhappiness at the first instance or medicate ourselves away from it at every turn. Dark has as much to teach us as light.

The other lesson of the year is, ironically, one in not giving up. We give up in all sorts of ways, little and big, not just giving up dreams and wishes. Every time we decide it's too much trouble to do something or take the easier, lesser way, it's a form of giving up. After awhile, these acts of giving up pile around us like wood on a pyre and if we're not careful, our lives are consumed. Or, rather than a fire metaphor, maybe I should use ice. Because that's how it was for me: my life became frozen.

So, bend over and pick the soda bottle off the sidewalk and throw it in the trash rather than walking by and leaving it for someone else; go for that walk; look at that old story idea one more time; take a chance on the nice man who asked you out for coffee...

I don't make resolutions, but my hopes for the new year are that I keep learning, and that I remember, remember well, what I've already learned.

Have a blessed New Year, everyone.