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Posts Tagged ‘priorities’

Knowing Your Limits

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , on February 8, 2011| 7 Comments »

I don’t like knowing my limits. In fact, I prefer the opposite: I like believing that I have very few limits, and making this belief as true as possible through sheer force of will. And when I discover that I have limits that won’t budge through will power alone, I try to create a work-around or at the very least find a more positive way to frame it for myself. 

I’m thinking about this right now because it turns out I’ve been fighting off a bacterial infection in my tooth for the past two and a half months. Fighting and losing, I might add. In spite of this, January was one of my more productive months in recent memory. In addition to writing ten essays for this website, I completed almost a third of my new novel-in-progress and wrote two new short stories. At the same time, I was thinking, “This is great, I’m so excited by what I’m doing, but why can’t I do more? Why am I so tired?” Only now do I have the understanding as to why these accomplishments exhausted me quite as much as they did.

So now it’s time for me to focus on taking care of myself, which is requiring a little bit of juggling over in Priority Central. The problem is, I believe that taking care of myself is a high priority, but sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle of other, flashier, more exciting priorities. When confronted with the choice between starting a new project and sitting around resting, I’d rather start the project. Plus I have this built-in Protestant work ethic that starts screaming at the slightest sign of the dread vice Sloth. And we won’t go into a certain pervasive stubborn streak in my nature.

Which is why I’m only stopped in my tracks now, when my tooth aches to the point where I might not mind ripping it out with my own fingers. I can’t keep working at my normal pace because I am physically incapacitated enough that I cannot concentrate. Here it is: I’ve reached my limit.

This week I’m forcing myself to take it easy. I don’t have specific word count goals or project goals. I’m trying to suppress my frustration at being delayed on all of this work that I’m so excited about doing. After all, I’m pretty lucky to be so enthusiastic about my work in the first place, and the excitement will keep. (Hear that, excitement? You are so going to stick around.) I’m going to watch some cheesy movies and TV shows, and I’m going to sleep as much as possible around my schedule of medicines. And I’m going in for more dental work, which is why I’m going to need all this recovery time in the first place.

This is life. I want it to be smooth, but it’s not. It’s bumpy, and it gets in the way of itself all the time. I don’t even get to bank up this being-good-to-myself time because I might need more of it later, depending on what this tooth has to say for itself. I want to stay up late every night and drink every minute in and live my dreams right this second, all the time. I want to be larger than life, but I’m not, at least not as often as I’d like. Sometimes I can’t do much of anything but sit here and wait to feel better and let numerous more knowledgeable people poke at my tooth. That is a limit, yes indeed.

But better to pack as much as possible within those pesky limits than miss out on being alive at all.

Anyone else run into an inconvenient limit lately? Feel free to commiserate below.

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Life as a Work of Art

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , , , on February 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

A few weeks ago I read an essay by one of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk, about how to think outside the box. The entire essay is well worth the read, and I might discuss other aspects of it some other time (yes, that’s how good it is). But for now I’m going to focus on just one brilliant paragraph:“We are all creative. The only thing we really have in this world is the ability to craft a life. One day your life will be over, and we are largely unsure what happens next, but during the time we’re alive, we get to choose what we do. We create a life.”

Crafting our lives is the ultimate form of expressing ourselves, and we all do it, every single one of us. The decisions we make on a daily basis form the shape of our story, both in our own heads and in the outside world. That’s one reason why I’m so big on priorities: your priorities can quite literally determine the direction your life follows. Our priorities are the guiding vision for the complex artistic creation of who we are.  (more…)

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The Dangers of Advice

Posted in Arts, Life, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 13, 2011| 13 Comments »

A few days ago, I read the excellent article “Writing and Mortality” by Rachel Swirsky, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.  I recommend reading it and coming back here, but since I don’t always do that myself, I’ll summarize. She talks about some advice she read about writing, how if the project you’re working on is not the project you’d be working on if you only had six weeks to live, then it’s the wrong project. Rachel calls foul on this advice, saying that if she had only six weeks, she’d be busy spending time with her loved ones. “Artists,” she says, “aren’t only real artists if they would spend their last few days creating art.” 

I agree with Rachel one hundred percent. Creating art is a high priority for me; in fact, I’ve structured my life around increasing my time to do so. But it’s not my highest priority, and that’s okay. This truth was brought home to me recently when I was suffering from root canal complications.  Mostly I was thinking, “My god, the pain, the pain, please make it stop, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop the pain.”  But when I could focus beyond the immediate suffering, what did I care about the most?  I wanted to spend time with my husband and my little dog, and I wanted to write long e-mails to my best friend.  I’m an ambitious person, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t thinking about my writing anymore.  What mattered to me was the people I love.

Taking a step back, this entire discussion was sparked from a piece of writing advice. I read a lot of writing advice every week.  I even occasionally write some writing advice.  It’s amazing how much helpful information about writing I can learn from the internet (although at this point, a lot of the advice I read is a reminder more than a revelation).

But this advice is not infallible, and it cannot be followed blindly.  Each piece of advice requires consideration, and if you find it doesn’t work well for you, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong or a bad writer or anything else.  It means that advice is not for you, full stop.

People try to give me advice all the time (and not just about writing, either).  Here are some examples of advice I do not take:

1. You should write every day. Yeah, I don’t write every day.  I usually take weekends off, and then I come back to the computer on Monday full of fresh ideas and vigor.  That’s what works for me, for now.
2. You should write what you know. Sorry, I don’t actually live in a world with working magic or a world set in the future, but I still write about them.  (Yes, this advice has deeper connotations that are more helpful, but its phrasing can be misleading.)
3. You should write x words every day. Unfortunately, only I know how many words I can write per day, and this number changes over time and depending on circumstances (like, for instance, a root canal or quitting the day job).
4. You should only submit to pro paying markets. I actually kind of follow this one, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s silly.  Really I should submit to any markets I feel like submitting to, right?  If I’d be happy seeing my work at a certain publication, then I’ll submit.  If I won’t feel happy or I think the publication is shady in some way, then I won’t submit.  So this advice isn’t for me.
5. You should/shouldn’t outline. Um, really good writers go both ways on this one.  So I’ll do whatever I like, and experiment with both.  (For those wondering, yes, I outline for novels.  For short stories, it really depends.)

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Advice is in the eye of the beholder.  People give advice about what works for them as individuals.  But we are not cookie cutter people, and therefore some of this advice will not work for you.  The trick is to learn what you can, and then adapt that learning to fit your own lifestyle, your own priorities, your own artistic strengths and weaknesses, and your own voice.

I would love it if you would comment with some advice you have read or received (writing advice or otherwise) that doesn’t work for you.  It can even be something that I have said here on the blog (gasp). I can’t wait to see what you all come up with!

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It’s all about Priorities

Posted in Life, tagged , , , , , on November 23, 2010| 4 Comments »

On the wall right inside my front door hangs a map of the world, stuck by a great number of little pins.  The red pins represent ME, places I’ve visited.  The black pins represent my husband.  The white pins are places we’ve been together.

Here is a close-up of Europe on this map:

Lots of red pins, huh?  I visited every place with a red pin within a five-year time span, between ages 22 and 27.  I didn’t have a salaried job, I didn’t have paid vacation.  Most of the time, I didn’t have anybody who wanted to travel with me.  I had an extremely tight budget during those years.  Consider, too, that I started my business when I was 24 and was working completely for myself before my 26th birthday.  No safety nets there, let me tell you.  So how was I able to travel to all those European countries?  (Eighteen of them, nineteen if you count the one I’ve added since that time.)

Priorities, plain and simple.  One of my highest priorities in life was to travel around Europe, and therefore I did what I had to do to make it happen.

This is probably not the last time you’re going to hear me using that word, either.  I have this theory about life, that it’s all about priorities.  Sure, people start off with different advantages and disadvantages, I’m not denying that.  And some things are literally impossible to accomplish, or at least have such a very low probability of happening that it’s almost the same thing.  For instance, I am just plain too old to enter certain professions that depend on youth or a certain current level of physical fitness (unfortunate but true fact: sometimes healing takes a really long time).

But not as many things are impossible as we think. And once we begin to contemplate the realm of the possible, everything shuffles down to priorities.  My priority was to travel in Europe, so I structured my life accordingly.  I had a very strict budget, passing up on buying stuff I really wanted like clothes and dinners out so that I could save money for travel.  I passed up regular salaried jobs for a number of reasons, but not the least among those reasons was my desire to have what I considered a reasonable amount of vacation time to allocate to travel.  I learned how to be self sufficient and more outgoing so I could travel by myself.  I took some risks.

As we get older, we often gain certain obligations: spouses, children, aging parents.  But even with these connections, which have their times of joy and their times of heartache, ultimately my life is my own.  I’m the one who’s going to look back on my lifetime with happiness or regret; I’m the one who’s going to have to live with the choices I’ve made, whether they were good or unfortunate.  Maybe, as a consequence of other choices I’ve made, I’ll have to wait and have a longer-term plan to achieve certain of my life goals.  But it’s still all about priorities.

I’m not writing this post to make you feel bad if you haven’t travelled.  Maybe you don’t even want to travel, and that’s a perfectly fair choice.  What I want to tell you is that if you really want something, whether it’s to travel or to be an artist or to achieve happiness in your own special way, think about a way to make it happen.  Strive, try, and be happy in the freedom of your choices.  And if in the process, you realize your priorities are different than you originally thought, rest easy, reset, and try again.  That’s the last great things about priorities: they can change.

 

 

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