Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

All right, so the goal is six weeks of pieces up and ready to go by 12/16. And that leads to a question: Above and beyond simply making the pieces exist, what should my goal for this stretch of writing be? What am I hoping to accomplish?

Let’s start with my primary work-related goal of 2017: I want to earn a comfortably self-supporting income, centered around my writing. I haven’t managed to accomplish that in a long, long time, and it’s been incredibly corrosive to many aspects of my life. Time for that to change.

So what I put up over the next six weeks (and beyond) needs to be supportive of that goal. Okay, excellent. That’s a good starting point. But there’s one more thing: it’s important to me that the living I earn be in line with the Free Refills principles. What are the Free Refills principles? Clearly I have some explaining to do. (Watch this space.) The summary version is this: in a digital world (a world in which Our Cups Runneth Over), continuing to focus your efforts trying to make a living as a content creator based on our old capitalist models of scarcity not only no longer makes sense, it’s counterproductive.

Interest piqued? Good. This understanding will guide my creative process as I create my pieces for the next six weeks.

I love the feeling of being comfortably on the right side of my deadlines. This past week, I had all my pieces up by Tuesday and finished my drafting for the week on Thursday morning. What a lovely feeling.

But perhaps you recall that I’d declared my intent to have all my pieces for the rest of the year scheduled and ready to go by Thanksgiving. Perhaps you are figuring out, from what I said in that first paragraph, that I didn’t quite get there.

Yeah, not quite. I’ll be posting this piece Monday evening, just as soon as I finish it.

I’ll forgive myself for my “failure” this time around. Whatever chance I had of getting weeks of pieces together in time went out the window in the run-up to and the aftermath of the election. I couldn’t tune out the noise around the election, couldn’t tune out the anxiety I felt around me, couldn’t keep myself from feeling anxious as well. I spent a lot of time the last week or two before the election keeping myself distracted. Afterwards, I had to both grieve and then process what had occurred, and the shock of what seemed (and continues to seem) something of an inflection point in our country’s history–time will tell if this is so or not–demanded a response on my part. Which left me with little energy to do anything else, writing-wise.

And that’s all fine. But now we’re closing in on the end of the year. As with last year, I will give myself a year-end sabbatical, which leaves me three weeks to publish at least five weeks of pieces. Six would be even better, to give myself a little window of safety and ease at the start of the new year.

So let it be written. So let it be done. (But wish me luck anyway.)

I am grateful for the work I’ve gotten to do with Jerry. I am grateful at how transformative I’ve found our work together to be. I am grateful that I can look at my life before and after and see how much better things are now. I am grateful that my exploration of the TTW principles takes me outside to play. I am grateful for soccer and golf and tennis and mountain biking. I am grateful for skiing and snowboarding. I am grateful to be in a place with great weather and great natural beauty so that I want to be outside every day. I am grateful for having a teacher as adept as Jerry, someone who is inclined to experiment, to play–this is how TTW came to be, this is why it has worked. I am grateful to the clients we have worked with so far. I am grateful for the clients yet to come.

I am grateful that our idea worked, and I am grateful to have learned that change is more complicated than I thought. There is no magic switch here. Our patterns do not just go away. I am grateful to have seen that truth so clearly through this year of exploration. And I am grateful, deeply grateful, that change is possible.

Change is always possible.

I am grateful that today I am in a beautiful place among mountains, far away from all the noise. It’s quiet here, and the mountains embrace me.

I am grateful for the warm smells of cooking. I am grateful for the food we’ll get to consume. I am grateful for the traditions embodied in the meal, a thread running back through my entire life and into a time before I was. Today is a pause for prayer, that we are not discrete and disconnected from All That Is, but somehow something of us existed before we were born, and will ever endure.

I am grateful that today I’m with people I love. And I’m grateful for all the people I love, everywhere they are. May all of you–may all people everywhere–find peace and joy on this day.

This year I do not get to be grateful for how smoothly things are going. I do not get to be grateful for the feeling of flow. I do not get to be grateful for ease. Late summer clenched the air until mid-November, refusing to let go. Even the snow struggled to come. The world trembles. You can feel it.

But if you get still and comfortable and open up your center and breathe, you can be aware that behind and within it all, there is still the open, flowing breath, and a warm, abiding stillness.

Welcome, it says.

I am grateful for the breath and I am grateful for the stillness.

When it comes to my work, it is never as easy in real life as it is in my head. This truth causes me great struggle and frustration. And, honestly, I avoid dealing with it a lot of the time. The fly on the wall would see me losing myself in noise on the internet. The fly on the wall would see me playing a lot of video games.

It’s never as easy in real life as it seems it should be in my head. But I am grateful for this, because it tells me that my thoughts are not reality.

In writing I am an eternal optimist–right up until I come to the keyboard or notebook and actually start to work. In many other things, I often am a pessimist. It is going to be really bad, I might say. Maybe it is. Maybe not. But my thoughts are not reality.

This week’s pieces are dedicated to my friend Antonia.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have found that I can now approach what happened with the election with gratitude. Had the results been reversed, and had the side I preferred won, it would have been simple to maintain the illusion the everything is okay, that the system is working, that the problem is the other side, my side is correct and righteous and those people are assholes.

But that’s not true. The system is not working. The problem is not the other side. The problem is all of us, in the way in which we’re all contributing to the decline of civility, the dehumanization of those who don’t agree with us. Conflict of a harsher and harsher nature is becoming more and more the norm in our society, and the path to changing it will not be found in practicing more of the same. Winning the election wouldn’t have been a win. We’d all still have lost, because our system is now guaranteeing that we all lose.

I don’t want to live in a society in which everyone loses. I want to see that aspect change. So I am grateful for this experience, because it’s given me–demanded of me–this perspective.

Jerry’s piece this week took me by surprise. We both took the election really hard, but Jerry is usually so grounded that I expected his shock would wear off over the weekend, and he’d return to something like normalcy. So I was certainly surprised by the continued note of despondency in his piece.

As the days go on, however, I’m becoming more and more aware that there is not and will not be a return to normalcy, not as we knew it, on this side of this election. The political divisions between red and blue have been getting sharper for years, but this election was so divisive, and the sense of recrimination, disgust and betrayal so deep, that our society seems to have split asunder.

We have been talking here about how the purpose of TTW is not primarily to make ourselves or our clients into better athletes. That’s just a side effect. Rather, we’re engaging in concrete, embodied practices with the goal of becoming better people.

So now the universe has seen fit to give us a new playing field–one with the highest of stakes–to really test the TTW principles. What does “better people” mean in a divided nation? What does “better people” mean in a country in which the legitimacy of our governmental system is breaking to pieces before our eyes?

If TTW is more than just talk–and it is–then here is where the rubber hits the road. It may look like we’re trying to be better golfers, or tennis players, or whatever. But by practicing being in the present moment, not fleeing from what is, we become more skillful at living in this challenging world.

Related to the observation that in America we’re now so politically polarized that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum can’t even communicate with one another:

There has to be a way to break through, right? There has to be, or things are going to get real, real, real ugly in this country real, real, real soon.

I have been exploring the whaaaaaacky! notion that maybe I could use my skills as a writer to–check this out–actually make a living writing. As I search for jobs like copywriting, one of the things I have been saying to myself and to anyone who’ll listen is that I’ve practiced enough now that, if you give me a few examples to model after, I can write pretty much anything.

I don’t mean that to sound cocky. I’m just saying I’ve put my hours in.

Anyway, in the midst of the turmoil around the election and the rapid dissolution of a safe and functioning society, some brash, contentious part of me found voice and said, “Oh yeah? In that case, write something that expresses your political views while being something that someone on the other side of the political spectrum would actually listen to.”