Free Refills

#280Tuesday is pronounced “Two-eighty Tuesday.” Is this obvious? Other sound-possibilities those symbols encode–“Two-hundred eighty Tuesday” or, God forbid, “Two-eight-zero Tuesday”–are clearly aesthetically inferior. But wait. Are aesthetic judgments ever truly obvious?

A person whose expertise is the caring of men’s beards (Latin: barba) is called a barber.

A funny outcome of the way I’ve drafted and published since I started the Free Refills project three years ago is that I often can’t remember what I drafted to completion, what I drafted but never saw to the end, and bits that exist only as ideas. And I can never remember what ideas got published and what didn’t.

That I furthermore have tended to zero-draft in a space of immediacy has tended to mean that important themes from my zero drafts get forgotten when I move on to other things. It’s actually kind of funny.

Like for this piece right here, I find myself thinking, “Did I actually publish that thing about how my patterns are those of a sad person, or did I draft that idea but decide for some reason that I didn’t want to publish it, or did I only think about drafting it but then forget about it?”

I did a little searching while I was drafting and I found two pieces that relate to this question. This one is essentially the first paragraph of this piece. This one tells me that I started drafting, but never saw the concept all the way through.

It’s funny to be almost three years into this project and realize that there are huge amounts of low-hanging fruit still available to me to improve my process, the goals and procedures, ways that I might focus my concentration to do more substantive work, and ways (like what I played with this week) to hang on to the publishing practice while having vastly more fun, more play, and more time, offering more pleasure for readers (I imagine), and a far better understanding of how to make my writing actually support my career goals.

This whole thing about struggle and play remains fascinating to me. That for all my talk about ease and the way we can overcome our patterned need to struggle, I have chosen, again and again, to continue to struggle with my writing. I’d like to think that I’m capable of doing better than that, that I’m capable of choosing joy– surely I have the writer’s chops to pull it off–but instead it is easier to just do what I’ve always done, which is to find some way that writing can be a struggle. (For me, because I’m deep enough into zero-draft technique, it’s rarely the initial drafting, but it certainly exists in revisions and, especially, publishing–just scroll back from here to see how many pieces this year have been about the challenges I’m finding with my publishing practice.)

What it amounts to–and to fully explore this will take probably multiple chapters in the first or second book I’m writing with Jerry–is that for some reason, I am subconsciously choosing to create this drama in my life. The most obvious reason, of course, is that by continuing to do what I’ve always done, I can keep myself from moving forward.

I mean, if you really think about it, when you decide to break out of a self-limiting pattern, you are in essence deciding to kill off part of your ego that, irrespective of its flaws, has helped keep you alive to this point. And when faced with change into a new way of being, we don’t have any experience to go on. The old way has kept us alive, the proof being that we are alive. The new way may not work out that way. Thus the essential fear of change hinges on, “If I do this, I might die.”

But I’m really pretty sure that having fun with my writing will not be fatal.

When you really think about it, there really isn’t any reason why the promise to publish daily has been so fraught, so anguished, so full of struggle, when really there are simply a million ways to take that same practice and make it fun.

#OneSentenceWednesday

“Okay, but seriously, Benjamin,” said the voice in my head. “Is there really any reason you’re making this so goddamn hard?“

And thus #280Tuesday was born.

I have to conclude that the practice of daily publishing is no longer serving me. Publishing a daily piece of any real substance takes most of my writing energy, leaving little available for more substantive work. Always having a next piece to publish, always having a next deadline has kept my zero drafts very in-the-moment. It’s good to know that I can always hammer out something on whatever is on my mind, but I’ve used the immediacy of the process to train myself away from the deeper concentration required to write a book.

Somewhat irritatingly, I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s a real value in putting something up every day as an every-day assertion that I am constantly working.

It’s about a month until the spring equinox. It’s my intention to have a solution figured out by then so I can announce new rules for the start of the fourth year of Free Refills.

This week’s writing was an interesting experiment but doesn’t feel at the moment like a particularly successful one. I hoped that writing about the message that is so at the heart of my guiding beliefs would help me develop a sense of momentum toward doing the work that matters most to me.

It hasn’t worked out that way. It feels right now that there was no real drive, no impulse in what I had to say. Every word was true, but it inspired nothing.

Perhaps it will feel differently as the writing has a bit more time to settle. We’ll see.

I’m hardly the first person to bring this message. And my expression of it is a far cry from the most elegant:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

(Of course, the use of the word “enemies” there doesn’t exactly resonate with my “we don’t have to kill each other anymore” conclusion. But I’m going to allow that the possibility of the universality of abundance may have been a lot less obvious 2,500 or 3,000 years ago. Universality is easier to imagine in a world in which the interconnectedness of all people has never been more obvious or more concrete.)