Live Now and Zen

Because even when it seems like a gag gift, the present is still a gift

Tag: socrates

Taylor Swift, Socrates, And My Brain Walk Into A Bar At 3 A.M.

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“The unexamined life is not worth living.” ~Socrates

Ruby asks me again if I’ve seen her keys

It’s 3:31 a.m. All the male creatures in our house are asleep. I am wide awake once again, sitting on the sofa in our living room. Beneath my feet, our fourteen year old border collie has settled temporarily, taking a break from her mid-night wanderings. In a minute, she will jump up and trot off quickly as if she just remembered she is late for an important meeting. She will get halfway across the room, stop, then look left and right, confused about where the hell she was headed. Ruby and I are simpatico lately. We’re either both deep thinkers with too much on our minds or we’re both losing our shit. Maybe these things are not mutually exclusive or untrue.

Aside from desperately needing the sleep, I don’t mind being awake in the middle of the night. I appreciate the peace. I find solace in the hum of the heater kicking on, the faint crash of ocean waves coming from the ambient noise app on my phone in the other room, the click of Ruby’s nails on the hardwoods as she trots around looking for the car keys she can’t find. I try to focus on my surroundings and stay rooted in the present because this is good practice. Mindfulness is the antidote for the poison of overwhelm. But the truth of these late-night, sleepless hours is there is something, perhaps many things, out of kilter in my life. In these moments, I become innately aware I am adrift. I’m on a flimsy, inflatable raft in the midst of a vast ocean, mere inches above multitudinous unknowns lurking just beneath the surface. I’m fine for the time being, but my situation is precarious. I’m one rogue wave away from drowning. My sleeplessness is a sign. It’s time to gather my shit in.

I attempt to pull disparate thoughts from my spinning mind to categorize and file them away so I can get back to sleep, but I might as well be trying to pluck tree branches and airborne chihuahuas from a churning, F4 tornado. The desire to right all the wrongs in my messy life at 4 a.m. is admirable, though ill-advised. In the back of my head, Taylor Swift sings my story:

“I should not be left to my own devices, they come with prices and vices. I end up in crisis, tale as old as time…It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem it’s me. At tea time, everybody agrees. I’ll stare directly in the sun but never in the mirror. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.”

I have good days. Most of the time, I feel I am on the right path. Sometimes, though, while I’m sleeping, everything that has been running in background mode in my head pops up at once and overloads the system and I end up here. Deconstructing old trauma, adapting to life in an empty nest, managing a household, navigating health issues, raising a puppy, dealing with the manifestations of aging, trying to figure out who I am now and who I might like to be if there is a later, and accepting the incontrovertible truth that I have not been bringing my best self to the table for myself or the people I care about for years now, well, that’s quite a quagmire to wade through during the most opportune moments. It’s a bit much for the middle of the night. And it’s still going to be too much to face on three hours of sleep once the sun rises and I have to make an early morning trip to the grocery store ahead of hosting Thanksgiving at our house. Sigh.

While I can’t address my issues now and losing sleep isn’t going to make things one iota better, at least I can come here and let you know you are not alone. Most people are hurtling through life feeling frenzied and lost and imposter-ish. And the majority of the people you know who seem to have it all together? Well, they pull off that feat by living unconsciously, which, believe it or not, is worse than being painfully aware. Us up-all-night-with-our-thoughts folks may be sleep deprived, but it’s only because we’re honest and paying attention. So, I am here now to remind you and me to take heart. Today is another day in which we might still not figure anything out, but we’re alive and awake and that means we have lives worth living.

I Think, Therefore I Write

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My process includes a laptop and my two bibles.

My new blog friend and comrade-in-arms, Amy, wrote an article yesterday inquiring about other writer’s “process” of writing. I read her post and wanted to leave her a comment about my process, but what I discovered in trying to flesh out my exact writing process is that I had no idea what is was. Funny how you can do something every day for 263 consecutive days and have no idea how you did it. Socrates would be disappointed in me if he were around to see how truly unexamined my life is, at least in this arena. So, I tried examining my process. What I found today was that I didn’t want to write. It’s impossible to determine your process if you can’t start it. Instead, I played on WordPress, changing the appearance of my two blogs rather than being willing to contribute any written work to them. Then I played some Words With Friends and Mind Feud before deciding that what I really needed to do was write another bit in my book, which I have finally started. It wasn’t until I started writing there that I realized what my process is. In lieu of a comment on your page, Amy, I find I must write an entire blog post about my process for you. This is probably more than you were looking for, but you’re a writer. You know how it is.

My writing process starts with thinking. Lots of thinking. Sometimes days, weeks, months of thinking. Ideas germinate in my head before I am willing to claim ownership to them by talking about them or writing them down. I am a thinker, first and foremost. As an introvert, writing is merely the means by which I am most comfortable relaying my thoughts. I rarely write anything on paper. Instead, I will peck notes into my iPhone for future reference. When I’m looking for something to write about, I will revisit my Notes. Sometimes I add quotes I’d like to use in a story. Sometimes I add topics to write about. Sometimes all I get in the Notes section is a vague kernel of an idea. Then, I think about it. I leave it. I come back to it. Then, one day, what I am supposed to do with that tidbit becomes clear and I begin writing. Today, I wanted to work on my book. The idea for it has been years in the making. It has morphed like a shape-shifter, revealing itself to me in myriad forms until it appeared the way I thought I could best extract it from my brain. When it’s all said and done, I’m lazy. I don’t want to write a word until I’m sure it’s what I truly want to say. I won’t waste my time until the story I want to tell exists clearly in my head.

Then, like a woman possessed, I will keyboard my thoughts onto the screen so I don’t lose them. (It’s so easy to lose thoughts once you hit middle age.) My friend, Chris, told me to “write from the heart and edit from the head.” That was the best writing advice I have ever received. So, that is what I do. Sad fact is, though, I’m not a great writer. I identify with James Michener who said, “I’m not a very good writer, but I am an excellent rewriter.” My first drafts are rough. All my ideas are there, passionately written, but they are a mess. So, I rewrite. Luckily, I am an editor by trade. Editing is what I enjoy and is what comes easily to me. I move sentences. I reword them and rework them and piece them back together. My thesaurus and dictionary are my closest friends. Literally. They sit one foot from my MacBook as I edit, and I would never write a word without them.

I consider my work finished when I feel good about it. Of course, it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes I am finished because it’s midnight and I have to be up in six hours and this is all I have to offer. I have learned during these past eight months of blogging that it’s more important that I write than to love what I have written. I can’t become a better, more accomplished writer by thinking about writing. Writing is a process and, no matter what your process is, thinking about being a writer doesn’t make you one. I put words on a screen so I can legitimately claim to be what I know I am at heart. If I can mix philosophers here and toss in some slightly edited Descartes, the truth is that I think, therefore I write. That is the only way I know how.