Do I want to write today? Some of the stress I was under earlier in the week has been alleviated, I slept a bit better last night – 71% according to the sleep cycle app, but then it was 79% two nights ago, so doesn’t necessarily correlate with a good mood in the morning. I don’t know what those percentages are based on – is it percentage of a ‘normal’ night’s sleep – eight hours, maybe? When I first installed the app, it spent the first few days saying it was calibrating, so maybe it relates to how much sleep I had in those first few nights? Or is it a kind of index which also takes into account factors like frequency of waking in the night or proportion of deep to light sleep? Whatever, it’s never 100%, and very rarely over 90, so 79% is pretty good.
In checking my sleep, I got distracted onto Twitter and came across this quote:
“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”
Dorothy C. Fontana.
Hmmm – that’ll be me, then. No surprises there. I retweeted it anyway.
Is there any other activity/artform where you create so much ‘stuff’ just to throw it all away again? Another tweet from the same person’s feed:
‘To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over….”
John Hersey.
That’s not quite what I meant – I was thinking not of the early drafts that become something in the end, but what I do: writing for its own sake that never does and never will go on to become ‘something’ – not about perfection, but just ‘splurging’.
Incidentally, after I’d written the word ‘stuff’, I tried to think of a better word for the products of ‘creative’ effort, and I thought of ‘material’ – which reminded me that my Mum – who was trained as a seamstress– used to sometimes call fabric/material ‘stuff’ – oh the wonders of language!
Where have I got to? Not very far is the answer, but then I very rarely do.
I wrote about Tara Brach a couple of days ago. One thing I struggle with in her teachings is the idea that to manage your emotions you need to identify where they manifest physically in your body and focus on that. But emotions occur in the brain, surely? I’ve had this problem with other meditation teachers – I once raised it with the leader of a meditation group and he was really dismissive: ‘oh, so you think it’s all in your head, do you?’ in a tone that implied I was being deliberately obtuse. But although there are conventional physical reactions to some emotions – mostly concerned with changing the heartbeat or breath – isn’t saying that love comes ‘from the heart’ metaphorical? To be continued (maybe).
