10 Minute Rule

Yesterday’s local holiday celebration tapped me in to a reality that has been staring me in the face for a long time, but for the grace of love I have been able to actively ignore. You see, I do not belong in my town.

When I walk through the town I don’t exist as an individual but as a role or as the personification of a role. I am the coach. They call me that in stores and restaurants and when they see me on the street. Most of them don’t even remember my name. The other day I was in another city entirely on a staycation and someone from my small town was there and recognized me… as coach. What happened in that brief moment is what happened over and over again last night. See, when there is no present need for that role, there is little people can do but to comment on that role, have those kinds of brief discussions with me, and finally politely stare and smile expecting me to move along.

I felt completely an utterly alone in the world.

I didn’t entirely recognize this in the past because when I am out in the public space it is either in my role, during a time when my role is relevant, or when I am with my partner. I don’t have a partner in this space anymore. So, I am solo in a city dedicated to and populated by dyads. It is extremely difficult to be the single person in a city where every adult is either married with a huge family or a college-aged kid who exists in an entirely separate reality than I do.

I was lonely and I was angry and I felt the way I often assume a muslim woman in full burka would feel moving through an American suburb. Everyone looks at you, labels you, and has no real use for you or connection to outside of that.

What this means moving forward is that the world I am continuing to slowly create for myself needs to be one built from love and friendships and situations where the people around me appreciate who I am as a person. It means that I can no longer live in a scene where partnership is the price of social entry.

When the President tweeted a picture from his days with the WWE of him beating someone up and superimposed the words CNN on the face of his victim, I shrugged. I don’t think I entirely cared or was surprised. He’s that guy. However, that guy is going to have a lasting impact on what we call decorum in our world. He has billed himself as a ‘Modern President’ and exposed a culture that still, at the root, is about allegiances and a story it wants to tell. I feel like the entire world in in that place right now. It was evident in the Arab Spring and the Brexit and Trumpxit’s that are very much connected. It exists in the way that Manny Pacqiuao lost a boxing match when he landed twice as many punches as his opponent and connected at a much higher percentage than his opponent but was fighting in his opponents home nation.

We have separated from reality and begun to spin ourselves around dispersed non-realities which match the ideas that we want to believe in. Author Lisa Cron wrote, ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we believe it to be.” There was a moment late in the Bush II presidency where I thought that the world was on the verge of both recognizing and counteracting that philosophy. We were going to see the world as it is, if only briefly. Instead we closed our eyes even tighter against the reality and allowed those doing the talking to spin a narrative that gave us cause, blame, and even a way out. Cron also writes, ‘From birth, our brain’s primary goal is to make causal connections–if this, then that’. This is the basis of modern advertising, which is the basis of modern politics and decision making. We convince ourselves of cause and effect and create from that causality a world view that is not entirely real. The result is a world that is on the verge of moving on from common sense, and moving towards open ignorance of anything that is possibly wrong with it.

Once we move on, then what?  

Back home from a quick ‘staycation’ (because that cannot be a real word), I find myself on my old couch, staring out at a yard cluttered with old dog poo, dead grass, forgotten patio furniture, and a poor effort at yard design. There’s the bones of a treehouse out there laying at the base of a tree, never to be raised into the sky. There is clutter, waste, and neglect. My yard is a dying metaphor of my relationship with this home and this town overall. Further, it is a metaphor of my relationship with desire and passion. In other words, both have been left largely untended.

When the balance of doing things because I had to outweighed the things I did out of love, I didn’t see the long term problems. After a while, dealing with stuff became the way of life for me. I stopped writing out of passion and instead wrote out of practicality and a need to maintain publishing credits. I stopped trying to create a home and a life that worked for me only to cling to what I felt I could reasonably handle. I stopped stretching the boundaries of my love, falling back into what I believe was a safe holding pattern. In essence, I stopped moving forward.

If it sounds like this is going to be one of those motivational blogs from this point, it isn’t. I’m merely acknowledging where I am at. I don’t know what I need to do now in order to ‘get better’. I do recognize that I’m not capable of having that life I want in that space I want until I figure out a way to put that passion first. In a sense I am doing that right here and now, getting into my morning roll, writing with her in my heart, and starting the day productively.

I took my first cup of coffee black this morning, listening to Ed Sheeran while sitting at a desk in the Fairmont Princess of Scottsdale. Call it a Groupon staycation. There are all sorts of names for finding a way out of your daily routine. Funny how here I’m falling into my daily routine. My new one, at least. This morning I texted my heart that the foundation of my morning ought to involve coffee, music, and her between my arms. In lieu of that I’ll take the literary comfort of words.

Ten minutes is a solid start to the day. Of course, another evolution is that ten minutes is going to be a minimum. If I’m on a roll, I ought to keep going where possible. Call it ‘At least 10 minutes of writing a day. Every day.’

So how to spend these 10? I’ve spent about a quarter of the time so far, marked by the edges of songs. Still, I don’t have terribly much to say. Yesterday I rebooted the Idea Archive, an old structure designed for me to dump all my ideas into one well with the thought that getting them out of my head and on to paper created space for new ideas and kept my brain growing and stretching. It may not be a coincidence that when I stopped archiving, I stopped developing new ideas and lost momentum furthering old ones. Self-reflection is beautiful. Self-reflection is a bitch.

One choice I’ve been teetering on is the destruction of old work. I have a handful of stories and novel starts that represent very old ideas—some thirty years in development. It is time for those to go away. It doesn’t have to be ceremonial. I’m just going to go home and dump them in the trash…

Okay, maybe I will start a fire. Burn them in the backyard, watch the ashes float away. Call it renewal. My mom burned my first novel, supposedly by accident. This could be an opportunity to revisit that event and make it my own, the way culturally we readapt words and ideas to reflect our growth and ownership over them. I suppose you’ll see what happens tomorrow.

These are the first words I have written in nearly a week. I’m being honest with myself about that. I chose not to write for that long, and I was okay with it. Nearly 2800 straight days of writing and finally, I failed. Perhaps I should have termed this blog the Ten Minute Challenge, because over time it became more that than the natural desire a writer is meant to feel for the craft. I started loving the lore of writing more than the act itself and I corrupted my desire for the craft. Even now I am not writing this for me. I am writing this because the woman I love–my life partner–asked me to write. Everyday. You see, I tried to deny her, and I did for a turn. Still, I could no more deny her than I could deny air, water, or food.  Every word pulled from the ether bears the fingerprints of her desire to see me happy and for me to rediscover my passion. Until then I am bound by that promise.

I spent the last year conjuring apologies, mostly to the love of my life, and never for actually what was going on. See, I was acting opposite of my nature in a misguided effort to maintain the illusion of a great many things. I was at once the Wizard behind the curtain, the great juggler, and the man who dreams of being naked and alone on stage, exposed for the fraud he truly is. Above all else, I tried to maintain the illusion that everything was okay.

Everything was not.

So here we are at the place where I am all out of apologies and no longer capable of being someone who is not true to himself and his passion. I failed at what mattered the most, and it wasn’t the blog. Perhaps failing is what I needed to do in order to see how corrosive my life had become. Now I start over, and not in the ‘I’m going to say this for the blog and then forget it a moment later’ fashion, but in ‘tear everything down in your life and leave only what will not be stripped–leave only the foundation’ fashion. For days the words were not a part of that foundation. I spent those days on the couch in misery or playing with my kids and I continued thinking about what else I could remove and what actually mattered, what didn’t, and who I am–not who I was.

Answers are not easy to come by, but three things emerged:

1. It is important to be true to your passion.
2. You must be brave in all things.
3. You are who you become, not who you have been. That memory of yourself is for other people. You are not bound by it in any way.

These are my truths. This is my way forward.

The number one reason people don’t work out is not time. It is patience–and by patience I mean dedication. The two words are as intertwined as strands of DNA. Without the patience, without the dedication, one cannot achieve the goal. My goals swirl round the concept of personal happiness. The two areas of that I believe require only me to succeed are Writing and Physical health. These are areas of Wellness which create for me the backdrop of my life.

I’m thin on words tonight save those precious few above and a handful I will try to get out below.

Some Thoughts:

1. Yesterday everything did spiral out of control.
2. It often feels like I am not in control of the things that matter most. There is that feeling of spiraling that washes over me and leaves me out of breath,
3. I need something to hold on to.

I wanted to steal a moment before things spiral out of control. I am operating on less than three hours of sleep and less than six cups of coffee. We started the day with a 6 AM football practice and followed up by having a friend over. Later–not too much later from now–we expect to hit the dollar theatre to watch the final Fast and Furious movie. Afterwards I race back to the house to drop the kids off for a sleepover and head back out and across town to pick up my lady and then further out of town towards a concert. Yeah, it is only Tuesday.

I was up late reading stories, playing minecraft, and generally efforting to spark my creative fires. The jury is still out on whether crafting is a help or hinderance or where my head is at with things in general.

Here is what I do think: I think there is a wealth of wonderful material and life left in me, though I feel quite a bit stuck in this space between where I am and where I am going. This is true health-wise, writing wise, romantically, and spatially especially.

Here is what else I think: I am looking for inspiration and guidance in all of these things, but I don’t exactly know where to look. I seek knowledge in books and buddhism mostly. I even read books about parenting and teaching kids to behave, though those things are more situational and intuitive than a book allows. The areas I mentioned are most likely the same, but my level of desperation is quite a bit higher there.