Day 112: Careful consideration

A few things have come together for me:

• Taking a break from my devices this past weekend was tremendously useful to me.  I'd almost forgotten how much I value that space.  I'd almost managed to forget how often I get sucked into a device for embarrassingly long periods of time, at the end of which I feel like I've achieved nothing - even if I have read more New York Times articles than you can shake a stick at.  But honestly, how many articles about the ongoing impeachment hearings do I need to read in one day?  Or even in a few days?
• Also of note: I have been working nearly every weekend this semester to stay on top of an overload of commitments.  (Also of note: I have psoriatic arthritis which isn't entirely under control, and I don't live my life as if that were true.)
• Yesterday, the humidity plummeted again (it was around 1% at the local airport, which is - get this - near the ocean, people, but still the air is so dry that it sucks the moisture out of every. single. thing), and I woke up with a headache that could only be described as an extinction level event.  I always hesitate to use the word "migraine" (I'm not really sure why), but it really can't be called anything else.  I got it under control, but between it and the Advil, I was walking the fine line between unmanageable pain and nausea.  It wasn't a fun day.  
• As a result of which, I didn't post here.  Which, interestingly, felt more like a relief than a regret.
• Last week, someone suggested that I try a mental practice, just to see what happens: instead of framing things as a question, I let a statement happen instead.  This basically has to do with my lifelong habit of overthinking and overanalyzing everything - I can think of 20 sides to a square.  It's nice to be able to see nuance, but it's not particularly useful for checking in with my gut.
• On my day away from digital devices, I also felt relief not to have to post here.  And it occurred to me to maybe think about rethinking my magpie year.  And I started thinking about commitments and what I said I'd do and meeting expectations and and and.  Lots of questions: should I make a new plan, with a different kind of commitment (I will post every other day/every Thursday/whatever)?  What will people think if I say, after 100ish days, that I'm not doing this anymore?  Is it actually in keeping with the lighthearted magpie spirit to allow my shiny-object-distraction soul to be distracted by other things?  Is it OK to say that I've learned some interesting stuff about myself and now I'm going to lighten up?  Should I/can I/ought I to?  And then I remembered: statements.
• And the statement is: I don't want to post every day right now.  Or, at least, I don't want to feel obliged to.
• Ah.  OK.  I can work with that.

So, there it is.  I'm not saying that I didn't go around a few more times.  I have a lot of trouble giving myself grace (we've talked about this), and so there's been quite a bit of: but you said!  However, the statement part of me knows this: I said it to myself.  No-one will die or be harmed if I now say to myself that gentleness and kindness means renegotiating the terms of my engagement with writing.  There are times when "I don't want to do it" doesn't cut it - but this isn't one of them.

The fun thing for me about having initiated this project is that I am writing again - not only here, but in my journal, and other scribblings that I hadn't been giving myself permission to try, and that I now am; I'm looking forward to having more time for that.  I'm spinning again.  And there's a small part of me that is thinking of trying a creative sweater-sized project again.  All of that, I think, came out of the project of committing myself to doing this one creative thing every day.  I'm good with letting that creative thing be wider than writing here.  So, I'll be here, and I may keep that day count because I'm finding it interesting, but it won't be every day.

Meanwhile, with my "blogging time" on Sunday and Wednesday, I wound up that yarn and cast on for a hat.  It's getting cold in Seattle, and Kiv needs to keep her head warm.

Day 83: Perfectionism

This project has given me an interesting lens through which to view whatever streaks of perfectionism I may have.  I say it that way because I don't tend to think of myself as a perfectionist, and, looking at how I manage these posts, I'm beginning to understand why.

So, first off, I was going to write and say that I've had to learn to, to at least some degree, shoot from the hip.  I write something and let it go, on a pretty quick turnaround.  I definitely reread and edit, but I don't spend hours on these posts (as if you couldn't tell).  So, in that sense, I've had to let go of any desire I might have to polish and re-polish. 

I have also posted a whole lot of really trivial stuff.  This is in keeping with my stated goal, and it has definitely loosened me up a lot.  Thinking about Disco's coat?  Write about it.  Noticing that I tend to trick myself into swimming laps in sets?  Write about it.  Feel stupid for posting something that seems stupid?  Post it anyway.

So, you could say that, in those ways, doing this has helped me to relax my grip on things a little bit, or maybe even a lot.  (Because dudes, there have been a lot of trivial posts over the past nearly three months.)

But, I realized as I went to write this post, to a very significant degree, those are places where I already had a fairly gentle grip on perfectionist tendencies.  Which is why I felt able to say that bit, up in the first paragraph, about not being much of a perfectionist.

Except.

Except then I thought about all of the posts I haven't written.  The posts that I think about for hours, sometimes, about the topics that are really capturing my heart and mind right now.  The posts that I really want to get perfect - to get right - before I put them out there.  The posts that I am so worried about getting perfect that I never even start to write them.

Oops.  And dammit.  And also, interesting.

Day 31: Gifts

Once upon a time, there was a young woman.  This young woman had a boyfriend (whom she eventually married) who loved to hike.  He had grown up hiking, and had a real love of climbing to the tops of things.  And he wanted to share the tops of things with her.

Now, this young woman was in reasonable-ish shape.  But not climbing-to-the-tops-of-things shape.  And her boyfriend (later her husband) wasn't particularly good at calibrating those climbs to what she could actually do; he was calibrating them to his desire to share the outdoors and beauty with her.  So he took them on hikes that were really hard for her (but not for him).  And she spent those hikes struggling, and watching him not struggle, and feeling like she was holding him back, and feeling like a failure, and hating herself for that, and hating him for putting her in that position, and just generally being miserable and unhappy and angry and resentful (not to mention red-faced and panting).

And then one day, they got a puppy.  And, since she was about to spend a month in the Trinity Alps doing dissertation research, she took the puppy with her.  This puppy was a long-legged, happy, playful sort of puppy, with breeds like german shepherd and collie all mixed into her heritage, and she had energy to spare.  At home, she got three walks a day (to set her up for success, you see - a tired puppy is a less-destructive puppy), with lots of romping and playing.

The Trinity Alps are the mountains around the Trinity river, which has cut a gorge right down through the rock.  The tribe that the young woman was working with* have a language whose directionals intimately reflect this landscape: everything is described as being either upriver or downriver of other things; and also as being uphill or downhill of those things.

So this young woman found a trail where she could take her dog hiking.  A trail which ran upriver downhill from her car, and then downriver uphill back to her car.  It was steep.  And really hard.  And the first time she went on that trail, she spent a lot of the downriver uphill leg hating herself for being slow, and out of breath, and...  Her brain travelled that familiar path (also uphill, as it turns out), to the usual refrain: holding someone back.  Except, it was just her and her puppy.  And as she slowed down on a switchback to regain her breath, she could see that her puppy wasn't impatient or resentful.  Her puppy LOVED it!  Just as much as she LOVED going fast!  Or stopping entirely!  There were smells to smell, and running back and forth to be accomplished, and dirt to scratch at, and squirrels to consider. 

And panting?  Far from being embarrassed about needing to pant as she climbed uphill, this puppy panted all the time.  Happily, unconcernedly - the puppy breathed the way she needed to breathe to be comfortable and to do what she wanted to do.  And so the young woman, unobserved by other people and in the company of a dog who couldn't care less, learned to breathe hard without being embarrassed about it. 

There wasn't a happily-ever-after ending.  Life is a lot more complicated than that.  The young woman and her soon-to-be-husband still went on hikes where she often felt incompetent and miserable.  But she also hiked alone with her dog, and, on those hikes, she learned to love the quiet of the hills, and the growing strength of her body.  She learned to pace herself, because she knew she wasn't holding anyone back.  That dog offered her the gift of companionship without expectations of anything except time together.  She taught the young woman that stopping to smell a plant, or look at the ground squirrels, or to pant a little bit isn't such a bad thing. 

In fact, it just might be the whole point.


*As always, my most profound thanks to all of the Native California tribal communities who have given me the gift of their time, and who have allowed me to learn from and work with them over the years.  The tribe in this case is the Hupa (the language is also Hupa).

Day 26: Toni Morrison

I woke up this morning to the news that Toni Morrison has passed away.  I was going to say "that the world has lost a truly great writer", but, thank god, she has left us words to savor and to roll around on our tongues and in our minds, and I am grateful.  There's a lot I want to say when I can, but for now, I'll let those words speak for themselves.

“Our past is bleak. Our future dim. But I am not reasonable. A reasonable man adjusts to his environment. An unreasonable man does not. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. I prefer not to adjust to my environment. I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and choose the open spaces of ‘we’.”   - Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood