sendings

Writing is supposed to be a practice. Like a yoga practice, it's meant to be something done daily in various forms. Like a yoga practice, daily is a bit beyond me. The image in my head of “a practice” is far too idealized to implement in my life. My life is filled with mundane feelings and chores, set in the same old living room as always. The thought of “a practice” always leads me to some spiritual idealism that's out of reach. Perhaps because I don't think of one particular action, but the whole scene: the weather, my outfit, how my day went, the room, the lighting, the time. Of course that's out of reach, so much is out of my control.

So I'm dropping the “a.” I can much more easily wrap my mind around just: practice. Show up a couple times a week, do some drills, maybe scrimmage at the end. That's something I can handle. Not trying to reach nirvana, just trying to stay loose, flex the muscles a little.

Thanks to climate change giving us a 60F day in early February in the middle of The Great Plains, I could play some softball with my rec league team on Sunday. When it comes to softball, I hold a lot of things to be true: 1. Being good is nice, but having fun is more important 2. I can improve a little, with conditioning, skills training, listening to my better teammates, and just playing. 3. I don't have to be a professional, or meet any particular skill level, to have fun playing or to feel it's worthwhile.

I just think it's fun to play as best I can, when I can. I think it's fun to lift weights and jog a little, for their own sakes, and to improve my game. It's fun not to take the game too seriously, even as I do my best.

I mean to apply that thinking to my writing. So instead of writing as spiritual practice, a perfect pose of reaching for nirvana, I can have writing as a sport. It's not a practice. It's practice. Sometimes some drills (prompts), sometimes strength and conditioning (finding synonyms). I'll admit, the siren song of the professional writing world is quite tempting. But I can't skip straight there. So I'll have fun here in the rec leagues while I can.

Can I share a pet peeve of mine? Of course I can, it's the internet, after all. Here it is: tireless.

That's it. Just the one word. Writers I know use it, writers I love use it. I have grown to hate it.

Like anything, it's the context that matters. I usually see the word “tireless” used to describe people, particularly in it's adverbial form to show what good works they are doing in the world. Tirelessly distributing aid to wildfire victims. Tirelessly advocating for the rights of our trans neighbors and friends. These everyday heroes simply never tire from their efforts to right the world's wrongs.

But it's all so unrealistic. And dare I say, unhelpful to describe people as beings who don't wear out. I get it: writers are trying to indicate the enormity of the effort that people are putting in to making the world a better place. The idea is that folks are stretching themselves, putting their everything into the cause/task at hand. The job doesn't end, and tireless people don't quit. They continue plugging away.

I guarantee you they're all tired, though. Maybe they get tired and do the work anyway. Maybe they get tired and take a break. But they're definitely tired. After all, people aren't machines. Work takes effort. Living creatures need to recover between bursts of work. In our admiration of the people doing work we value, we accidentally erase the effort it takes when we label their efforts as “tireless.” They're tired, let them pause. They're tired, go lend a hand.

The problem with heroism is when we think that heroes are some kind of different creature than the rest of us mere mortals. That they have reserves of strength or energy or time that normal people don't. It's not true, though. People doing good work are just like the rest of us. Fatigued, exhausted, tired.

This is not the beginning. Stars, do I wish it was. I would like this to be an attention-getting opening, followed by just the right amount of exposition. Some difficulty, some conflict, but not an egregious amount. Resolution. Denouement.

In short, I would love for my life to have a narrative structure. Blame it on all the books I insist on reading. Blame it on a fear of uncertainty. Blame it on a hunger for meaning. I want the time I think of as “wasted” to be “worth it.” (Worth what, though?)

I would like to believe this could be a beginning. Isn't it intoxicating to think everything could be different, after this? I gobble up stories, both fiction and true, about folks realizing their path. The stories that have been sticking with me lately, though, are not a hero's tale where one overlooked youth discovers that the One Thing they happen to have a knack for is going to save the world. It's the stories about people switching things up, learning skills long after school. The novelist with a master's degree in zoology. The competitive cyclist turned actor.

These stories remind me that there's no single narrative arc, that there's no one true path through the woods. I'm not on Earth to traverse the metaphorical woods, but to live in them. Maybe it's just my recent entry to middle age, but I'm slowly internalizing that everything is basically all middle.

Time is a spiral or a cycle, where pinpointing a start is nearly impossible. Any one place is as good as another. Had I started writing 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, would life be better? Maybe. Also maybe worse. Likely both, in different ways. Humans are story-tellers, have been for millennia. We make meaning. We create the structure. I think that's why I'm drawn to this medium of words. I want to create some structure to the chaos that is life.

I could make this a beginning. I could massage the memoir of my life to create Grand Meaning and make it a Fresh Start. I don't think that serves me, though. I prefer to remember that beginnings are everywhere, all the time. So commonplace as to be completely overlooked. Every point in the cycle is both new and old, fresh for this one moment, replicating the pattern of previous moments. Any moment could be The Moment, and no moment really is, except in hindsight. There's less pressure.

This isn't the beginning, and it's more possible for all that.