Tag Archives: blog planning

The Folly of Trying

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My counsellor told me a story:

A man was asked at a conference to come up onto the stage, where the speaker had set a single chair in the centre.

‘Try to pick up the chair ,’ the speaker said.

The man picked up the chair.

‘No, you’re not getting it,’ the speaker said.  ‘Try to pick up the chair.’

The man picked up the chair again.

‘No, you’re still not getting it.  TRY to pick up the chair.’

The man put his hands on the chair and then, in a flash of inspiration, he understood.

Because TRYING to pick up the chair is not the same as picking up the chair.

If you TRY, you never actually achieve the action.  You just TRY.

Or, as the venerable Yoda said, in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’:

Try not.  Do.  Do or do not.  There is no try.

(I had that on my door at college.  I don’t think I understood it then.  Now I do, I really, really do.)

This wisdom has really been banging on my door today, as I struggle with a cold, coming on the back of a bad spell of IBS and ME/CFS.  I am busy TRYING.  Trying to get better.  Trying to feel well. Trying to cope with the housework. Trying to write.

Sometimes you have to recognise the wisdom of ‘Do or Do Not.’

Lately, I worry that this blog has become more about illness and less about creativity.  More about my TRYING experience.  But I think it really is an important lesson to learn for creative people.  We push ourselves and push ourselves, driven by expectations and perfectionism and Gods-know what demons we have inside us, deftly planted there, no doubt, by our loving parents. We dance the dance of the OUGHT-hogs.  The SHOULDS.  We are so busy forcing meaning into our lives as creatives, as Eric Maisel ill-advised (IMHO), that we pulverise our souls and our bodies into gibbering wrecks, terrorised by all the goals we fail to achieve and the standards we are incapable to meeting.  Books about how to write invariably advise the student that they have to write every day, no matter what.  I don’t think thats healthy or, frankly, practical.  Of course, it helps if you can.  A lot.  But seriously, who can write when their child has been up all night vomiting, or they have just received a redundancy notice?

Sometimes you have to treat yourself with loving kindness.  Sometimes you have to lower your expectations, and maybe even give in to the avalanche that Life has dumped on your head.  I have been talking to several friends who are all struggling with ill health this week, recovering from cancer treatment or at the end of a difficult pregnancy, or even in bereavement, and I truly believe that this is something all of us needed to hear.

Sometimes you are allowed to stop trying.

Sometimes its good to stop trying.

And then, when you have given yourself a break, a rest, a time of wound-licking, you can get up and go and do what it is you need to do.

MInd you, I have probably just proved myself wrong by writing this blog post, because I’ve spent the last six hours lying in bed groaning, absolutely convinced that I couldn’t write anything today.  So there you go.  Take from that what you will.  Just promise me something?

BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Happy Creating,

EF

 

Outflow: What the **** am I doing?

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new study deskYou may have noticed that yesterday was Wednesday and that it was eerily quiet here at Evenlode’s Friend.  Oops.

Its not that I wasn’t thinking of you, believe me.  Its just that, well, I won’t go into too much sordid detail here, but there are some stomach complaints that leave little room for writing blog posts.  Yes, I was ill. I still am.  I’ve been hit by a particularly nasty bout of IBS, and its going to take some time to settle things down again.

But of course, because I never do anything by halves, my darling husband is having a couple of days off right now and decided, for a whole bunch of really complicated reasons, that it would be a great idea for us to switch offices.  Yes, while I am ill.  No, he did not expect me to help move the furniture.  So now he has the north-facing back room, and I have the sunny, and much larger, front room with the sofabed-futon thingey to lounge on.  I suspect I may have got the best end of the deal, don’t you?

This brilliant wheeze unfortunately has its down side.  Evenlode OPs Centre now looks like a cross between a bad jumble sale and the aftermath of Chernobyl.  Major purge, rethink and planning are urgently required.  (Shame my brain is on illness-induced sabbatical, but there we are.)

new study messThis is not entirely a bad thing, however.  I need to be systematic about everything right now, and the study change is just the external materialisation of the internal mess I am in.  Because it turns out that this blogging thing is much harder than it looks, and I am going to have to be a lot more organised than I thought.  I can’t just fire off a post for this blog in half and hour from a standing start, as I do with my personal blog, because its not that kind of site.  I want my readers to be informed, and that means my research has to be spot on and my posts thorough and thoughtful.  I need to write ahead, and I haven’t worked out how I can do that and juggle my health issues and life at the same time.  I think its good, on the whole, to reassess what you are doing periodically, but I’ve never been one for planning systematically how to do something, as the state of my desk drawers unvariably show.

Yes, its cosmic learning time!

So, today’s Outflow is about two things, redesigning my work area, and planning my work method.  I must be mindful about what I’m going to need and the issues I am going to have to plan for, like not being well enough to write on a posting day.  I’m going to need a workspace that supports me, with all the tools for writing, painting, planning and running this little endeavour within easy reach.  And its got to be easy to keep tidy and organised because I am crap at being neat and perversely, as a Libran, I don’t like working in a messy, ugly space.  In this way, writing a blog isn’t any different from my other creative work, my writing and painting.  It just has to be more systematic and focussed.

If you keep a blog, I would love to know how you organise yourself ahead, and plan your posts.  And if, like me, you are lovingly embarking on making a new creative nest for yourself, I would love to hear about that too.  Please leave a reply (the tag appears at the top of each post for some reason, thats another design issue on my blog To Do list!) and maybe we can do a compendium post of all the shared ideas and wonderful ‘Rooms of Our Own’.

Happy Creating,

EF