Free Refills

I had gone to bed a bit before midnight. I awoke later and recognized I was awake. Consciousness welled up, and I was a long way from returning to sleep. I thought about the feeling of the night’s quiet, the particular weight of the darkness. Was it more likely 3:30 or 4:30 a.m.? The latter would be just fine–I know this amount of sleep, and know that it is enough to sustain me. I massaged the feeling of the dark, rubbed it. It felt like 3:30. I turned and looked at the clock and the clock proved me right. 3:28 a.m.

Three-and-a-half hours of sleep is a scary number for me. I know I won’t be at my best when the morning’s light dawns. I will make mistakes that I wouldn’t otherwise. I can function, for I feel the fear of lack of sleep in a far different way from long-ago me who suffered so, but the fear is there, and it is partly justified.

I knew the waking was likely when I went to bed. The night had that feeling. When I went to sleep, I could feel that sense of far too much to do and far too little time to do it in. I knew, but am so far powerless to prevent, that the expectation of wakefulness might lead to wakefulness. It’s like some devil, friendly in its way, happily accepting the invitation to return as I call it by name in the dark of night. I am flawed, devil. Torture me.

Are you aware that the calendar and the clock are fictions? Believing in them is simply an agreement we have made, a means to exert a semblance of order, as best our human minds are capable, on the complex cyclicality of the whirling gears of the celestial bodies. We mapped them with numbers we found pleasing. A day, roughly the period between sunrise and sunrise, is a real thing, something we can experience, but there’s no reason, none whatsoever, that we declare it to be 24 hours long. A month–the period from full moon to full moon–is a real thing. A year–let’s call it winter solstice to winter solstice–is as well. But they don’t map onto each other with the comfortably comprehensible elegance that our clocks and calendars imply. The lunar cycle isn’t exactly 29 days, and it certainly doesn’t exist in obvious-to-human-eyes phase with the not-exactly-365-day year. We say twelve months, but we’ve divorced our months from the moon that inspired them. Twelve months in a year? It’s closer to twelve-point-five.

But to disregard the calendar because, in our demand that the nearby universe fit our need for easily comprehensible order, we have created a fiction is to a certain degree to miss the point. The calendar is an agreement, roughly world-wide at this point, that we will order the parade of our days in this manner. It could have been different, and in some cultures, actually has been. Our seven-day week connects to no natural phenomenon at all. (Surely it exists because, in a particular creation myth deeply important in our culture, the creator rested on the seventh day.) We declare there to be twelve months in a year? Okay. We put the new year not on the winter solstice, as it naturally should be, but a handful of days later? Fine. (I suspect we placed our New Year’s Day there in order to be exactly one week after Christmas.) This is how we’ve decided to do it? I’ll play along, more or less.

I map my own writing year onto the calendar, after all. The two weeks before the calendrical New Year are my yearly sabbatical. The new year that matters more to me, the energetic new year, I therefore celebrate in my actions away from the action of writing, which has for so long defined me.

In my center, I know the solstice to be the true start to the new year. But the part of me that exists in agreed-upon conversation with the world is happy to say that today is different from yesterday, to mark it with a new number, and to wish everyone I speak to a Happy New Year.

As this is the Refill closest to New Year’s Eve, I want to wish you a safe and fun and happy ringing in of the calendrical new year, with just exactly the right amount of intoxication to meet your needs.

And keep in mind that “fun” doesn’t need to mean “social.” Last year, I locked myself in my house, alone, and it was perfect.

The calendar is a fiction, but it’s one we agree to believe in, and many of us are ready to see the back of the thing we called 2017. Wish it well as you send it on its way.

See you on the flipside of the calendar page.

I have claimed that I’ve never missed a deadline here on Free Refills. I think today is a good day to admit that it isn’t actually true.

Twice this late spring or early summer, during the deepest stress of my divorce, I had pieces essentially ready to go, needing at most one more read and light revision before they went up, and then simply went to bed, totally forgetting until the next morning that I hadn’t published. I remember thinking, “Wow, in case I was wanting to deny the ferocity of stress I’m under…”

Twice I have had a piece pretty much ready to go and then let myself get distracted by a girl. On reflection, this was obviously the correct path.

And recently, there was a night when Jerry and I got to talking, and then got into the whiskey, and I prioritized the fun, the joy, the openness of the release into the immediacy of the moment over getting my writing done.

Every single person in my life with whom I’ve spoken about the daily publishing has urged me to ease off a little, has said that I seem a bit too rigid, has questioned if the lack of flexibility really serves me. Perhaps interestingly, in each of the above instances, I have forgiven myself readily. The more flexible path has seemed to be the correct one.

And this is why I’m sharing this now, during the time when I’m speaking of the sharpening of tools. I set something about daily publishing down during the run-up to my sabbatical. What I picked up at the start of this piece, I can see as scratched and dinged and well-worn from use. With this piece of writing here, I hone this tool to a new edge. It gleams. Is it the same tool, now to be used in a slightly different way? Or is it a new tool entirely?

Let’s test the sharpness of one of my tools.

Last week, I titled a pair of pieces, “Atlas Yearns for Rest.” Any piece with “Atlas” as the first word in the title surely can’t help but bring to mind the book by Ayn Rand and the question of whether or not that was on my part in any way intentional.

I can’t really help it that, over the course of her career, Ayn Rand managed one time to fit two words together in a way that actually evoked something interesting. But just to make clear that though I agree that evoking Atlas’s burden makes for compelling imagery, it doesn’t mean that I have space in my life for Rand’s chicken scratchings. Let me offer this:

By any measure taken with an open heart, Ayn Rand was a hideous person who espoused a hideous philospohy. Her inane worldview appeals to people smart enough to get their ideas from books–which does, let’s be clear, put them into a small minority–but not smart enough to realize those ideas are misguided, dangerous, and stupid. Ayn Rand is most famous for her novels in part because her hapless propagandizing on behalf of her sub-moronic philosophy can only work in a space in which she can set up countless straw men and then let her so-called heroes knock them down.

If you have been fooled by this swindler, I urge you: read more widely. Good ideas ring with clarion brightness and the sweetness of tiny bells. And consider opening your heart. The essentially grim black-and-white of the world she paints (or, more accurately, scribbles in crayon) is a far darker, sadder, less tasty place than the world as it really is, if only you allow it to be.

A task of winter is the sharpening of your tools. Taking a tool and honing out the dings and scrapes of the prior year and bringing it to full working order is a form of contemplation. Sit by the fire, do what needs to be done, see the dancing flames, feel the warmth, and reflect.

Christmas Day has lost much of its magic in our cravenly materialistic culture, but if you look, there’s still a lot of magic to be found. The Christmas myth still holds within it the potency of the magic contained within a gift and the act of giving. It’s not a mistake that the story of the Three Wise Men bestowing gifts on the infant Jesus has survived for two-thousand years.

It is with this in mind that I thought to ask myself, What was the main gift of my year? And I came readily to an answer: in 2017, I gave myself the gift of myself, and man do I appreciate it.

And from that answer, it was easy to ask myself what I hope to give next year: Next year, I give myself to the world.

The first days of winter. The growth begins anew.

With expansion comes fear, a desire to clamp down. But the fullness of change can no longer be put off. So, an incantation:

Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I breathe into my expansion. Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I continue to breathe.
Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I breathe into my expansion. Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I continue to breathe.
Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I breathe into my expansion. Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I continue to breathe.
Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I breathe into my expansion. Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I continue to breathe.
Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I breathe into my expansion. Regardless of the discomfort that comes, I continue to breathe.

Today is the energetic new year, the day the light goes to sleep earliest and sleeps longest. It is a day that requests maximal repose, that requests quiet, peace. The old year has passed on. The new one has just been born.

Welcome, gentle babe. Sleep now. Tomorrow, the growth begins anew.

Though I have (at least in part) let go of the identity that I am first and foremost a writer, I see that I have only released it in thought, not really in action: I still approach my day with writing as the core of my work. And I see now that this approach is getting in the way of my expansion. It feels strange to say this. I intend to set this habit down now, because greater things are demanding my attention. There’s a heaviness to the practice now. What I set down and later pick up again will be two different things.

Similarly, I have asked myself, again and again and again: Would I be willing to put Free Refills down if I deemed that it was no longer serving? The answer has to be yes, but the prospect of it makes me feel scared, makes me feel like I am betraying something, perhaps that I am betraying myself. But that can’t be right. If it were true, the self I’m betraying is an old self, no longer me. And, honestly, I think the old me would welcome any move I could make into greater fullness.