Our prompt word for January 29th is “exercise.” Thanks so much, Wendy, for the energetic prompt!
I try to exercise every day.
Okay, maybe try is a big word.
Maybe it’s more like I plan to exercise every day.
Okay, okay, okay. I think about exercising every day.
During the height of the pandemic, when Alex wasn’t going to school and the library was closed so Chris, my other son, stopped going out once a week, I bought a treadmill.
Are there months when it doesn’t even get used? Sure.
I still try to go out for walks when it’s not too snowy or icy or cold or hot and humid.
But does it get used when those conditions are not the case?
I used it a whole three times last week. And once so far this week.
I need to try harder.
***
This self-motivational post is brought to you by Just Jot it January and Wendy! Please be sure to check out Wendy’s blog here!
I’ve been thinking about the motivation to write. I’m not talking about fiction, necessarily, but that’s a big part of it that I’ll get to in a few minutes. My thoughts at the moment are more on writing about real life and the need to connect with others who might be going through the same things as I am. The desire to put it all out there to find out if I really am alone in my living room with my laptop. And I am alone. Alone with millions of other people, all of them doing the same thing I am. Being part of that crowd is motivating indeed.
But then, a couple of days ago I read an article about David Bowie. Only it isn’t really just about him. It’s about all of us. Every one of us on social media, whether a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr… any of them. Whether you liked Bowie or not, you need to read this. I’ll give you a minute. Please come back when you’re finished.
We’re urged as writers to bleed on the page. That if we’re not bleeding – if we’re not putting everything we’ve got into what we write – then no one will be interested. But how much is too much? There are some who will tell us that there’s no such thing as too much. They are the ones who live off the angst of everyone else. I think of them as emotional vampires; they’ll say anything to get us to open up to them and say it’s for our own good. But they’ll never go out of their way to help. They’ll just motivate us…
What motivates you to write what you write? To share what you share? Has it changed since you started?
I understand how cathartic it can be to share a problem with the world, or go off on a rant when something is weighing heavily on the mind. I suppose the question comes down to how many details we give out. Its scary when we realise just how easy it is to give away our privacy. To box it up in a neat little package that is a simple post on social media and hand it to the entire world. In the past couple of weeks I’ve written 50-word stories on my fiction blog. Fifty words can say a lot. I even wonder sometimes how much of myself I’m giving away via fiction. To me it’s glaringly obvious what I’m imagining and what I’m bleeding; I can only hope it’s not as obvious to everyone else.
In the past I have tried to put a few filters on what I post. First and foremost, how does what I’m writing serve me? My reason for blogging of course is to have people read, so yes, I write what I think people will click on. When a post seems to be entirely self-serving (such as a rant) I feel uncomfortable. Sometimes I’ll post, sometimes it goes in the trash. If a post serves others, whether it’s a public service announcement, an example of what it’s like to parent a special needs child, or a prompt, I’m more likely to hit the publish button without thought for my privacy. On this blog I draw the line at the people in my life. I only write about what they willingly make public themselves. Even then I sometimes hesitate. There are people in my life I don’t talk about at all. Personally I have very little to hide about my life. Until I read the article, I didn’t even really think about discretion or, on the flipside, indiscretion. Now I wonder.
It’s contradictory that we’re so isolated and yet so out-in-the-open. We’re a society that no longer needs to go to a store to buy things, nor venture outside to talk to our neighbours, yet people half way around the planet can experience our lunch, our bowel movements, and if we wish to remain anonymous, even our sickest desires and without consequence. But it all starts with one thing. Motivation.
I ask you again, what’s yours?
The “Motivation” prompt is brought to you by Aaron Elmore at the blog bearing his own name. If you don’t already follow him, please check him out!
To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 14th post here!
The internet is this wonderful place where you can meet new people, engage in scintillating conversation, build a lovely virtual community, and then hand over the keys to a lunatic to house-sit for you while you take a long weekend.
The lunatic would be me. I’m sure Linda will pardon all the selfies I take as I put all her furniture into compromising positions. And these vomit stains will wash right out, I’m sure. Also, the bullet holes were totally already in the siding before I got here. And let’s not discuss details, but you might want to take all your potted plants outside and burn them, for their own good. We’ll just say that they’ve seen things that the average botanical ought not see. (I blame Helen Espinosa for that, actually. Do you even vet your guest hosts at all?)
Anyway, I’m taking over this joint for the week, and more to the point, I’m in the driver’s seat for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this weekend, so, you know, brace for impact and hide your kids and all that. You will probably also see an unrelated ramble from me of the sort I usually post at my own nest of iniquity. If you like what you see, feel free to stop on by and pay a visit to the cubby I knocked out of the drywall where I do my own not-quite-daily driveling at Accidentally Inspired. If you don’t like what you see, well, uh, I’m sure there’s some bleach around here somewhere. Or at least, there was, before I had to clean up after Helen. (I’m pretty sure she killed a guy in the basement, Linda. It definitely wasn’t me. Either way, uh, sorry about the corpse in the basement.)
It occurs to me that you might be curious who I am, just in case you need to make a description for the authorities later. I’m a jack of many trades, master of maybe a quarter of one. I’m a father of two, husband of one, and I sometimes write about that. I teach English at public high school just outside of Atlanta (fear for the future), and I rarely write about that. I run often, for escape and inspiration and to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, and I write about that probably more than the average person cares. Finally, I’m a writer, with two novels drafted and in various stages of editing, and about a thousand more ideas kicking around inside my skull, looking for a way out.
That’s what my blog is really all about — the day-to-day trivialities of the average Pav, working a full-time job and more or less meeting the criteria of a dad and trying like hell to write good stories that might, one day, get published, so that you could hold a book of my work with my name on it, and so that I might hopefully get a couple of dollars for my trouble.
So, yeah. That’s me, and you’re you, and if you’ll just sign these non-disclosure agreements and your life-and-limb waivers, we’ll get started.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
I’m truly amazed at what I’ve learned as a response to the pain in my right shoulder. What I’ve accomplished leads me to believe that perhaps pain is responsible for the entire evolution of man.
Okay, maybe not… but just maybe.
For all of the fifty-one years I’ve been on this earth I’ve been right-handed. Apart from holding a fork, and even then only when I have a knife in my right, I’ve never done much with it. Oh, and touch-typing of course. But even then, I can’t manage to hit the space bar with my left thumb without seriously thinking about it. Doing so slows me down considerably, so I’ll stop trying.
But now! now I’m able to do almost everything except write with it. And why? Why do I use my left hand now without even thinking about it? Because for most things, using my right is excruciating. Eating, drinking from a cup, brushing my hair, reaching for things, even wiping my butt; I’ve suddenly become ambidextrous. Pain has taught me how to do all these things at more than half a century old!
So I got to thinking about the evolution of man and how pain might have helped us get to where we are. Think about technology for instance. Imagine how many blisters we’d have and how wrinkled our skin would be if we actually had to walk and then swim to another continent! Not to mention being eaten by fish with numerous rows of teeth! And what about grocery stores. How much hunger would we have to endure if we had to wait for, say, a potato to grow. Or a cow. With the invention of aisles upon aisles of ready-grown food we don’t have to worry about that!
So I conclude that pain must be the greatest motivator in the world. Can you think of one better? I think not!
I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).
An article about bamboo.
I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.
Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that it seems miraculous. Some species can grow as much as three feet in 24 hours. (I picture the analogue of my son sprouting up to my height overnight and it gives me the shivering willies.) Yet many people who try to grow bamboo get frustrated and give up and never see it achieve that growth, because the first five years of the seeds’ growth is entirely underground.
Imagine it.
Day one, plant a seed.
Day two, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day three, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day four, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day five, water, check for growth, nothing.
Wash, rinse, repeat, until …
Day 1828, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day 1829, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day 1830, water, HOLY SHARKNADO THERE’S A FOREST OF BAMBOO IN MY BACKYARD.
That’s a heck of a lot of days, a heck of a lot of faith, and an ungodly amount of patience and tenacity: an untold amount of time spent doing a simple but time-consuming thing (watering the plant every day) with not an ounce of feedback that the thing you’re doing is useful, worthwhile, or even productive in any way. For all you know, on day seven the seeds died and turned to dust in the ground, and you might very well be wasting your time. But if you don’t keep working, the seeds will definitely wither and crumble.
And this is a little like writing, innit? Or maybe a lot like writing. Actually, make it a metaphor for whatever you like, but I think it’s particularly fitted for writing. Because we writers do our work underground. We have the inspiration to write and plant that seed deep in the loamy earth of our minds. We enclose ourselves in our batcaves, our secret chambers, our dark enclosures isolated from all human contact, and the words spill out of us like so much irrigation on the soil of our precious ideas. For days, weeks, months we toil in quiet and fear and clandestine hope that our pet projects, our favorite characters, our brilliant plot lines, will take root and spring forth, filling the world with color and the sweet scent of our inspiration … but we have no idea if it’s going to happen. Whether that field of bamboo represents simply getting published, or penning a bestseller, or even just finishing a draft, the finish line can feel so far away it might as well not even exist.
We see the bamboo fields that have sprung up in other authors’ backyards, and that gives us hope–I could have that, too!–but it simultaneously fills us with doubt–will it happen for me? And we don’t have a master gardener standing over our shoulder, telling us to keep our heads down, keep watering the seeds, keep fertilizing the soil, and all will be well. We don’t even have that five-year guarantee that bamboo has. For some, it may happen faster: they’ll have a backyard full of bamboo in the space of a year or two. For others, it may take longer: their garden may take a decade or more to sprout. For still others it may never happen.
But regardless of the speed at which the garden grows, I think any gardener will tell you that it’s not all about the end result. Sure, the rows of tomatoes and the baskets full of roses are the ideal, but even without them, the work is not a total loss. Because the work is therapeutic. Kneeling in the soil, breathing the unprocessed air of the outdoors, feeling the sun on your back, working your fingers in the dirt, plucking the weeds… the work means something in its own right. Likewise, forcing the words onto the page, exploring the characters, designing new plot lines… it means something. Yes, it’s about making the seeds grow, but throughout the process, you learn, you grow. And then, on day 1831, whether your bamboo has pierced through the ground striving for the sky or not, you come back ready to water it again. And again. And again.
Trust in the knowledge that the work matters, whether the bamboo grows or not. You have to be your own feedback. You have to fling your vision forward into the future and visualize those steely shoots springing out of the ground now, starting today, and let that vision sustain you, because the fruits of your labor are just going to be invisible until they happen.
Trust in the bamboo. Keep watering.
Thanks to Linda for allowing me to guest post while she’s out. For more drivel like this, check out my homepage over at Pavorisms.
There are worse things in the world than getting motivation from a fortune cookie, I suppose. But then, I think I can win the lottery. Will I? I guess I can if I buy a ticket.
While the statement on this tiny slip of paper is true, to a certain extent, it’s vague at best. Where is the trying? What do we get out of life if we just sit and imagine we can, without making an attempt? We get nothing, most of the time.
Case in point: I think I can make something out of this post. Am I giving it a half-hearted effort? Yes. Was I motivated by the piece of paper I found in a fortune cookie? Yes.
All this to say that, just because you think you can, doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at it. And there’s my de-motivational post for the day.
Chew on it.
Okay, but seriously. To be creative–to create something out of my own mind that is brand new–I have to be in the right frame of mind. No amount of external motivation is going to change that. It may help, but in the end nothing is going to inspire me quite like, well, me. When that spark fires in my brain that tells me I have something to write about, or I fall on something I’m passionate about, it’s like I’m a ball of energy, rolling down a hill, unable to stop. I can zing through a paragraph as though I was propelled by an elastic band, my fingers flying around the keyboard, unable to keep up with my brain. That’s when I would say to myself, “Yes I can!” except that I’m too busy creating to think such a thing.
So is the fortune cookie wrong? Personally, I think it’s possible to think too much.
If Facebook is good for nothing else, it’s an excellent way to have motivational sayings come across your desk every once in a while. I’ve seen this one a few times before, but with my birthday coming up it made me think. Contemplate life, even.
It’s so easy to fall into the psychological trap of mourning one’s youth. As the years pass we find we’re not able to do the same things we used to, both physically and mentally. We wake up in the morning with new aches and pains, we find gray hairs in places we never imagined would go gray, and skin wrinkling in places reserved in our minds only for someone’s grandparent. Yet one thing is true – if you’re reading this, you’re alive, no matter how old you are.
Whether or not you consider this a privilege, it is what it is. You are alive now and have the potential, for at least another little while, to affect someone else’s life. I may just be affecting yours as I write this.
I think if I could leave behind any legacy at all, it would be to remind people of this: our shared human experiences and our emotions know no cultural nor religious boundaries, and each and every one of us has the ability to affect another of our species. So be good to one another.
We’re all connected, if by nothing more than Facebook, and by nothing less than being human.
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