December in January: More...fun?

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, December in January, where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February. My shrink, a.k.a. my mental Rock of Gibraltar, has known me as long as anyone who has known me for the past eight years, and better than most. (This is, after all, what I pay her for, and what my fine, union health insurance paid her for before that.)

So when she says something, I generally find it to be both wise (because she is a well-educated smartypants) and considered (because she a thoughtful smartypants). Thus was I thrilled when I relayed my decision to make this year's theme MORE ROOM and she approved wholeheartedly.

Well, almost wholeheartedly, which I guess means "partheartedly."

Room, she said, was great. She was all for it. Given that I was a workaholic, though, and may I pause here to note that she dropped that clunker in there without so much as a howdy-do?, given that, had I perhaps thought of also making a secondary theme of MORE FUN? Because "fun" was something I generally stuck in quotes and/or onto calendars, to ensure it became a bona fide action item.

Mrs. Shrink. Please. Of course I thought of it: I'm a Virgo. I think, if not overthink, pretty much everything. This is why I continue to drive my sorry, overthinking ass 52 miles round-trip once monthly to sit on your leather love seat and cry. (Well, at Hanukkah, the G-Rock also puts out some pretty nice gelt for the customers.)

I also thought of, and rejected, MORE MUSIC. Because (woowoo alert!) when I looked at MORE MUSIC on the page, I felt sad instead of happy. Which is not to say that MORE MUSIC isn't 100% splendid in theory. Many's the time I've walked by my dusty guitar or watched a great performance on YouTube or thought fondly of the couple of songs I managed to squeeze out in early 2009 and been tempted to put MORE MUSIC on my priority list.

For that gal who makes HAVE FUN an action item, though, I figured that a MORE MUSIC would feel more like a burden and less like a joy. It would be sweaty and  effortful, not easy and joyful, some good-girl perversion of the real reason to make music, which is to open your heart and communicate (and yeah, to have fun, but not necessary as a subset of MORE FUN.)

MORE MUSIC, like MORE FUN, lacked ease. And if my signal phrase for 2010 is MORE ROOM, my watchword for it is EASE. Or perhaps, "E-A-S-E." You know: now with MORE ROOM!

If my suspicions and those of my esteemed therapist are correct, that I have a tendency to beat myself up, to toil to exhaustion, to cram 10 lbs. of work into a 5 lb. day, then a natural outgrowth of giving myself MORE ROOM should be more of all the other good things: joy, music, fun, laughter, exercise, health, and rolling around on the floor with puppies. If I keep in mind that things can be done with EASE, or that life can unfold with EASE, or that EASE exists not only as an idea, but a reality, maybe I can loosen my death grip on myself and my eleventy-seven projects. Maybe some of the eleventy-seven will naturally fall away with EASE.

And maybe monkeys will fly out of my ass. I'm still conflicted, you see. But I have worked to open my heart, and it would be foolish to deny it these things it now seems to be asking for, this MORE ROOM, this EASE.

Besides, this doesn't happen every day. The small, still voice doesn't try to out-yell the Tasmanian devil with the megaphone; it waits it out. And if you hadn't noticed, my time is less abundant than it once was. When September of this year rolls around, I'll be one year from halfway to 100, and the most generous soul in the world can't call that young.

So. Thus far, we have:

1. Theme for 2010: MORE ROOM
2. Watchword for 2010: E-e-e-a-s-e

I can't wait to see what I come up with next. No, that's not right. Of course I can.

I have all the room I need...

xxx c

December in January: More room

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, "December in January," where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

Several weeks ago, I happened to see a post to Twitter from a sometime/longtime web acquaintance, Dave Seah:

(In case you're reading from a mobile device or something else that can't parse the screenshot of Dave's tweet, it reads: "This week, I will try to practice 'do not hurry. do not wait.'")

I had no idea what it meant. Okay, I had some small idea of what it meant. It was about not being rushed into things, but taking time to handle them in a sane and rational fashion. It was about procrastination, or the not-doing of it.

But further unpacked, it was about a lot of other things: the over-and-over-again nature of changing our most deeply ingrained habits. And having patience with oneself during the process. And needing both the accountability and support of one's fellow travelers to reach this mythical new land of Doing Things Differently.

I didn't take the time to unpack it in the moment, for which I'm now very grateful. The small, still voice inside me screamed, "DM him right now and say you're in." And so I did, not knowing what "in" was, nor even really knowing Dave that well. I'd known of and read and vaguely admired him for years, but hadn't thought to start following him on Twitter until Pam Slim stuck us in the same post about her current web obsessions. We communicated here and there via @-reply, but only sporadically, not enough to allow for friend traction.*

"In" did not reveal itself for another month or so, when, mulling over how I might familiarize myself Google Wave to prepare for an upcoming conference I'm speaking at, I thought that a two-person collaboration with a fellow nerd might teach me a thing or two. Dave was game, bless his heart, and we were off to the races.

We talked about Dave's tweet, and what it meant. (It meant mostly what I thought it had.) We talked about how we might use Wave, and how to use Wave (it's not especially intuitive). We talked about goals and blogging; we talked about things we were afraid of and things we were no longer as afraid of.

Basically, we talked, we're still talking, and let the agenda unfold as it needed to. And it turns out that while this is not an especially comfortable place for me to live in that it feels unnatural, it's an exceptionally comfortable place for me to live in that it feels roomy. Luxurious, even, so much space and freedom in which to play.

This, I now realize, is what I was after when I began decluttering in earnest last fall, or even when I began searching for the articulation of my purpose back in 2007: MORE ROOM. It has roots in my bloody epiphany of 2002, my out-of-body experience on a shitty Santa Monica stage years before that, my move(s) from one place to another (only to find myself repeatedly back in my own, miserable backyard), my childhood fits of inchoate longing. O, holy night, aren't we all looking for that one thing, or at least that one clearly-marked road to it, that is the fullest expression of our being?

Of course, MORE ROOM is not the ultimate thing I'm looking for. But it is the thing I've repeatedly denied myself, that I've skipped over and brushed aside because who has time for such foolishness, nor need of it when one is willing to work like an ox, to push like a mofo, to break like the wind? And MORE ROOM is the next thing I need to find my way back to the thing, or to the path that will take me there.**

MORE ROOM, then, will most likely be my theme for 2010. Not particularly sexy***, but wildly extravagant (for me), which is a kind of sexy (to me): as I said in the original December in January post, I'm taking off a minimum of three months to make more room for myself, which means a further erosion of savings. I prefer to look at it as an investment in my future, a self-directed Ph.D. program of sorts, complete with lots of writing and reading and late-night coffees off-campus to hash over the meaning of meaning. I have no dependents and a relatively small overhead, so I can afford to be especially luxurious with my time, but I suspect anyone can create some room for herself if she really wants it. There was a time when the only time I could grab for myself was a quarter-hour in the morning with my spiral notebook, and grab I did: on the closed lid of a toilet seat, before my husband awoke. We do what we must.

What must you do this year? What are you planning to give yourself, and in which direction will you walk?

Whether you're plotting out your own December in January or are the blissfully organized, fully-mapped-out mistress of time management I hope someday to be, I would love to hear about your themes and hopes and plans for these coming months...

xxx
c

Image by srp6685 via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Interestingly enough, I've met up in person and developed nice friendships with both Jonathan Fields and Peter Shankman, the other two people in the post, as well as Pam herself. Quite a thing when done right, the Internet.

**I can hear someone, somewhere, arguing that MORE ROOM or the giving of it to myself IS the path; I hear you and appreciate it, but this is my cocksucking boulder and my motherfucking hill, and I get to name both the signposts and the obstacles.

***And who said everything had to be sexy, anyway? The Louvre isn't sexy, it's magnificent, as is the feeling one has walking through the Louvre, looking at all those objets that represent all that human thought and all those man-hours. I'll take magnificent or luxurious or even comfortable over sexy any day of the week. Sexy is good as a spice, but lousy as base nutrition.

Poetry Thursday: More music

You will
look better with
that 32" waist
eating more
fresh fruits and vegetables
sleeping eight hours nightly
doing first things first
and getting many things done.

You might feel
righteous
and virtuous
and even gleeful
with squeaky-clean windows
and a clutter-free car
and a bright white sink
empty of contents

Your friends
and your family
and your clients
would love
a thoughtful note
with carefully chosen words
and a stamp
or the exact right perfect gift
arriving via brown-suited courier
in a timely fashion
to commemorate their special day
and your thoughtful reverence

There are a thousand
fine choices to make
at the end of a year
and the beginning of forever
any one of which will make
your lungs cleaner
your mind sharper
your wallet heavier
your pants smaller

But if you are among those of us
who step up to the buffet of possibilities
and fret over what to eat first
may I offer up this:

Your stomach
will rumble
for a thousand tasty morsels

But your heart
which asks for so little
and offers so much
will never say no
to more room

Nor your spirit
to more joy

Nor your soul
to more music

Put a tender close
to what came before
and trust
that if you create the space
and allow it to fill up with love
all the rest
will follow
for all the rest
of your days.

xxx
c

Image by theogeo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

100 Things I Learned in 2009, Part 2

Wherein I (once again) attempt to show that one is never too old—or middle-aged, anyway—to learn. Or spout off about it. Part 1 here, in case you missed it.

xxx c

1. Making something short takes a long, long time.
2. And still provides a disproportionately large ROI.
3. To love is to serve.
4. Idiocy can inspire genius.
5. Podcasting is more fun than I thought it would be.
6. Screencasts are more fun for everyone than I thought they would be.
7. Writing for a year seems to take two.
8. Less is the new more.
9. If you don't like what's on TV, change it.
10. Never stop growing.
11. Especially when you want to.
12. The world's new-greatest radio station is YouTube.
13. Time Warner needs a good kick in the 'nads.
14. You don't have to like your teachers to learn from them.
15. In fact, you learn more if you don't.
16. I'm better at wrangling than I thought.
17. I'm smart enough to acknowledge that and move on.
18. Well, mostly.
19. When they say "stop to put on snow chains," they mean it.
20. If anyone is selling answers, run.
21. Clicking offline is the payoff for all the click-click-clicking online.
22. (And I mean click-click-clicking.)
23. Hilarity is less important than sanity.
24. Skype will be to Vonage as Vonage was to PacBell.
25. And it can't be it soon enough.
26. The best way to write about marketing might just be in verse.
27. There's a reason Einstein and Uncle Steve wear the same thing every day.
28. Consumables are the best gifts.
29. Cash is the best consumable.
30. With the possible exception of The Pears.
31. And PIE.
32. Keep your tools sharp.
33. The bear gets his days at the table, too.
34. The impulse to give away is almost never wrong.
35. The impulse to take on, not so much.
36. It is not what it cost you, but what it costs you now.
37. At a certain age, knits should be loose.
38. Their hatred is never about you.
39. And vice versa, hot stuff.
40. You cannot live well in two places.
41. The road to hell is paved with drive-thru windows.
42. Wealth really is a state of mind.
43. Wellness, on the other hand, requires peeling your ass from the couch.
44. "No, thank you" may be the most delicious phrase in the English language.
45. Followed by "delete all" and "forward to voice mail."
46. Silence is platinum.
47. $10 a month for faxing works out to $60 per fax.
48. .Me, you're next.
49. Collaboration is AWESOME.
50. So is having your 1,000th post land on New Year's Eve Eve.

New here? Or just uninspired to check the back catalog until now? I live to serve!

2009

• 100 things, Part I

2008

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2007

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2006

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2005

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

100 Things I Learned in 2009, Part 1

How about we start off this year's list with a riddle:

Q: What's harder than writing your annual 100 Things list?

A: Writing it after a year of blogging every day, plus once weekly somewhere else, plus writing a monthly column, plus writing another monthly newsletter, plus tweeting, plus Facebooking, plus whatever other goddamned writing-type stuff that I do in the course of my non-writing work.

You'd think all of that writing would prime me for some kickass listmaking: all that material! All spelled out, organized and time-stamped! Because hey! I'm a Virgo, right? But you'd be wrong. Hours and hours' worth of 100% wrong.

Still, this is one of those exercises I derive a great deal of value from that other people seem to enjoy as well. Your win-win, if you will. So without further ado, here you goo.

Go. I meant "go."

Oy, has this been a long year...

xxx c

1. You're never too old to be a nimrod.
2. Or less of one.
3. Or, thanks to Mike Monteiro, out yourself as one.
4. Malcolm Gladwell is even hotter in person.
5. Kermit didn't know how right he was.
6. Beginnings are lovely.
7. But endings have a kind of mature élan.
8. Boulders suck infinitely less c*ck when you mock them.
9. Especially when you do it in 2/4 time.
10. But I still wish I could see the top of this motherf*cking hill.
11. The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single purse-cleaning.
12. Even a comments thread can be a collaborative work of genius.
13. If you think your period is annoying, wait until you slide into a full stop.
14. For that matter, wait until I do.
15. My estimator is still bigger than my actualizer.
16. Blogs are going the way of the buggy whip.
17. So stick a sarsaparilla in my arthritic claw and call me "Granny."
18. I love Hulu, but I will pay for Netflix.
19. When the going gets tough, refer your ass off.
20. SXSW doesn't get older: it gets better.
21. Okay, it gets older and better.
22. But mostly better.
23. A second screen is worth its weight in third computers.
24. Burning out on words is where poetry begins.
25. Everyone has her price.
26. Mine, apparently, is a whopping 4%.
27. I will never become my best until I stop trying to be the biggest.
28. It really is nicer to give than to receive.
29. Making things is great.
30. Making things because you must is sublime.
31. Most of my favorite places are islands of awesome in a sea of shit.
32. Nei kung puts the "whee!" in chi.
33. "Meat salad" is not an oxymoron.
34. Or a euphemism.
35. (Outside the pokey, anyway.)
36. Anything can be art.
37. You can learn at least as much about yourself from the lists you don't write as the ones you do.
38. There's nothing better than reading a great book.
39. Except for reading a great book by someone you know.
40. Commitment is still the sound of prison doors slamming shut.
41. I'll run out of money before I run out of money for art.
42. Tina Fey is every bit as good as they said she was.
43. No, better.
44. It is much harder to figure out how to get somewhere when you don't know what "there" looks like.
45. That goddamn Yehuda Berg is a smart dude.
46. Goddamn him.
47. The best way to save time is to buy more of it.
48. Dollar for entertainment dollar, you cannot beat what came out of Judy Garland's twat.
49. Just don't bring it up over Christmas dinner.
50. Sometimes, the good guys win.

Next installment: Wednesday, December 30th! Can't wait? Luckily for you, I've been doing this crazy sh*t for five years!

2008

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2007

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2006

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2005

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

2004

• 100 things, Part I
• 100 things, Part II

Image by Jared Goralnick (@technotheory) via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Blank-of-the-year game: Gift-giving gift of 2009

I'm late getting on board Gwen Bell's backwards-for-forwards Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, but as La Bell herself sez, you can jump on that bus anytime you want. And turn it into a train, plane, or bicycle ride, as you like: if you are blog-free, you can tweet your thoughts, slip them into someone else's comment stream, scribble them into a notebook, etc. The juicy goodness is in the excavation. Join us!

Around this time last year, I made a decision: five days a week, for all 52 weeks of 2009, I would write here, on this little blog.

Why did I do this? For two reasons.

Reason #1: Writing for glory and eyeballs

Assuming it's done well (or is at least of some interest), regular writing translates into more readership. Cheap-to-free blog stats aren't an absolutely reliable indicator, especially when comparing a month rather than total visits per annum, but at least they offer some kind of metric. Here are my December visits* since I first launched communicatrix-dot-com, back in 2004:

• In December of 2004, this blog had 800 visits.
• In December of 2005, this blog had 3,500 visits.
• In December of 2006, this blog had 1,800 visits.
• In December of 2007, this blog had 3,700 visits.
• In December of 2008, this blog had 5,000 visits.
• In December of 2009, this blog had 8,500 visits (as of 3pm on 12/23/09).

The first bit of data you can extract from this is that if you're reading this now, you are part of a very elite crew: we could safely call ourselves The Tribe of People Who Like Reading for the Most Part Really Long Sh*t. We are few, but, I like to think, we are mighty.

The second bit is that what I'd like to think of as the natural growth curve of this site was severely thwarted by my asshattery in the Year of Our Lord 2006. Perhaps I should do an overlay with my liquor purchases for the year: there must be something that can explain it. The start-up of my (now-defunct) graphic design business? The launch and management of The Marketing Mix blog back in September of that year? Or my tenure as business/marketing columnist for LA Casting, which also began that month? (At least I can't blame the newsletter: I didn't start that until April of 2007.)

Reason #2: Writing because it's what you DO, dammit

I took a long, hard look at what I wanted at the end of last year. (Okay, and the end of 2007, too, bear with me, here.) And I realized that more than anything, I wanted to be the very best at what I'm the very best at. Which, well, I still haven't figured out.

But I know that the way I'm the very best at delivering it is writing. I was a passable actor and a just-barely-acceptable designer. I'm a middling teacher, a so-so songwriter and a dreadful (but heartfelt!) singer. I'm a reasonably engaging speaker, enough that, given adequate time and effort and opportunity, I might have a shot at become a great one (which would thrill me no end).

I do no such apologizing for my writing, except to say that for a while, I didn't do enough of it. If ever I had a natural gift, writing was it. And when you are given a gift, it is selfish and sad not to work at it. (To trash it with bad habits or neglect may be borderline sinful, but I check off the "spiritual not religious" box, so I tend to think that really, the worst thing about stomping on your gift is wasting potential, which I personally consider sinful in the Church of Colleen.)

Plus, with the exception of several years in advertising (which counts as stomping if anything does) and a few more recovering from the sting of Groundlings rejection, I have always loved writing more than anything. If I ever got stuck, my first shrink-slash-astrologer told me while explaining my chart, I could write my way out of it. Combing through the back catalog, even the wince-inducing sophomoric years, reveals more delights than horrors. I will get rid of every other book in the house, including my original Black Sparrow Press editions of Bukowski, before I let go of those ratty college journals and loopy, pain-filled spiral notebooks full of mid-30s angsty morning pages.

Results of the Great Writing Experiment of 2009?

I missed a few days, but very few, and more than made up for the total count with the two Salutesâ„¢ that bookended the year. (Lesson? They really do work for motivation.) It was exhausting at times and exhilarating at other times, but mostly, it just became That Thing I Do.

Can I keep it up in 2010? Do I want to? Yes and yes, although perhaps not here, and definitely not here in the form it's taken thus far. Not if I want to write anything else. Not if I want to make a living. (Note to those who would try this crazy experiment on their own: be sure you have huge cash reserves before embarking on a project that can easily siphon four hours off of your day, when you have other writing due.)

A natural question as I look back at this colossal gift I've given myself, this luxury of (largely) unpaid writing, is what I do as an encore? What will my Big Gift to myself be in the coming year, or the year after that?

I don't know. And I may not know until this time next year (or, you know, the year after that).

It's a crazy thing about gifts: the best and finest of them can start out looking a lot more like obligations than anything you'd put on your Santa list...

xxx
c

*If anyone is good with Excel and wants to compile a trends graph of visitors from launch to today, I'll give you the keys to my Sitemeter. We can make it public, we'll call it a collaborative cautionary visual tale!

Image by Kio Stark via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Words

You can find them in cities
on signs
and on subways
and sidewalks
and lines,
embedded in a thousand million faces.

You can find them at malls
and in books
and in mall bookstores
if you can find one extant.

You can find them in abundance
on trains
where they float in
on the clackity-clack
of the wheels on rails
through the small cracks in your attention
as you fix it on those cows,
that prairie,
that ramshackle bit of city
just outside the station.

You can pluck them from the very air around you
and
if you are quiet-quiet,
from the very silence itself.

You can find them anywhere
and pick them like daisies
or trace them like stars
or gather them like truffles
if you are French
and have a pig handy.

You can even
(god help you)
farm them like salmon.

But words
will never come to you:

You must go to them.

Visit. Talk. Sift. Watch.

Surround yourself with stories
and songs
and all the thoughts-out-loud
and truths told softly
and million-thousand words
channeled from places we can't name
through voices made fine
by work
and love
and attention.

And if one or two
call out
while you are on your way,
be ready to catch them
and rearrange them
and send them on their way
to the next passerby.

xxx
c

Image by ktylerconk via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Blank-of-the-year game: Great online discovery of 2009

I'm late getting on board Gwen Bell's backwards-for-forwards Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, but as La Bell herself sez, you can jump on that bus anytime you want. And turn it into a train, plane, or bicycle ride, as you like: if you are blog-free, you can tweet your thoughts, slip them into someone else's comment stream, scribble them into a notebook, etc. The juicy goodness is in the excavation. Join us!

I love Evernote and will doubtless do a screencast about it in 2010.

Instapaper rocks my online/offline world, too, thanks to its iPhone app cousin.

And Netflix, glorious streamer of an astoundingly deep back catalog that keeps me cable-free, fat and happy, is definitely up in the top 10. Five. Okay, three: I like watching old video more than I like reading anything on my tiny iPhone screen. (What the hell will I do when there are no more book-books?)

But if there was one application I'd fight to keep, it would be Skype. I'd first futzed with it back in 2006, collaborating on design projects with my delightful German friend, Michael (and several times, our Orange County-based clients, who might as well have been in Russia, for as conveniently located to me as is the OC). Multiple dropped calls and accompanying frustration made me dump it: when Michael and I did talk, we'd use Jajah, or he'd call me with some mystical magical cheap-to-free resource-of-the-moment he found (he's handy, is young Michael. And good. You should totally hire him, if you can.)

Today, with the addition of a Skype-in number (so clients can call me) and Call Recorder (so I can record our conversations and send them through yet another online application), I am loving Skype once again and more than ever. It's cheap, the quality is far, far better than it was when I first tried it and, using the iPhone Skype app, I can call from anywhere there's a wifi connection. (Since getting my iMac, then MacBook Pro, I can use the video function as well, but I'm lukewarm on video chat, as I find it more draining than a regular call, already draining enough as it is.)

More than anything, I love the way new tools show me new ways to look at things, and to modify my work habits:

• I don't need Evernote, but using it has become a reminder that I experience less stress during certain points of travel or project creation if I have all my crap gathered in one place
• I don't need Instapaper**, but now that I have it, I have begun to notice how my attention gets pulled away from stuff, and have begun taking other steps to correct it beyond offloading content.
• I don't need Netflix, but having it available has let me ease up on hoarding: with an infinite (for my purposes) variety of great stuff to entertain me when I need it, I don't need to be the custodian of all of these DVDs. That, in turn has helped me get down with flow and impermanence, the key drivers of the abundance outlook.

Next, what I need are apps that teach me how to write short, move more and yes, walk away from the computer entirely.

Engineers? How about it?

xxx
c

**Read It Later is fine, too, and has a nice Firefox extension and iPhone app; I just found Instapaper first. Main thing? If I find myself spending too much time reading something while I'm supposed to be doing something else, I bookmark it for later consumption. In that way, my "Best Online Thingamabobby" is much like my fave Internet startup: what I love most of all is learning a new way to work more efficiently, just like what I love most about Gwen's challenge is that it makes me stop and think about the "why" behind things.

Image by A Geek Mom via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Blank-of-the-year game: Great business discovery of 2009

I'm late getting on board Gwen Bell's backwards-for-forwards Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, but as La Bell herself sez, you can jump on that bus anytime you want. And turn it into a train, plane, or bicycle ride, as you like: if you are blog-free, you can tweet your thoughts, slip them into someone else's comment stream, scribble them into a notebook, etc. The juicy goodness is in the excavation. Join us!

Referral Friday began as a prompt from Duct Tape Marketer Jim Jantsch, a grass-roots, hyper-local/hyperspace response to the craptastic economy we were waking up to at the beginning of this year.

John called for an Internet-wide Make-a-Referral Week, where each of us made a daily effort to hook up a small business with someone who might need that business' services. Being a wily, opportunistic type, I jumped at the chance to (finally) create some static referral pages for the designers, writers and other service providers whose contact info I was repeatedly typing out as a response to requests for same.

Once the week had passed, though, I didn't see why we should stop. Neither did a lot of other people, I guess, and the idea of "Referral Monday" was born. Only I'm a stubborn cuss with a standing Monday essay feature and a love of internal alliteration*, so I stuck it on Fridays and became the referral caboose (one gets used to carrying up the rear when one's last name begins with a "W").

Like Make-a-Referral Week, Referral Friday was a boon, a win/win/win triple-"amen" score. I got to pass along the word of great businesses I'd discovered, thereby increasing the chances that they'd thrive (and I'd continue to be able to enjoy them), I got warm fuzzies for doing so, and I reduced my own writer's anxiety with the addition of a regular feature.

That's right: my greatest business discovery of 2010 was not a business, but a practice that's not even limited to business: helping other people helps me at least as much, if not more.

Of course, I did have a few favorite discoveries of actual businesses in 2009:

• Brown Bag Books blew me away with their curatorial excellence, delightful repurposed notebooks and ingenious business model
• Brad Nack, artist and global wanderer, similarly knocked me sideways with his sly, accomplished style and marketing moxie
• Adam Lisagor, friend and sometime co-conspirator, most inspired me with his wildly creative business output, adding Birdhouse and Put This On! to his other list of accomplishments

And if forced to choose one sweet, sweet discovery that made my year, it would have to be the lovingly restored Camas Hotel in Camas, WA, just down the block from Vancouver and across the river from Portland. Everything about it made me smile, including the owners, Karen and Tom Hall, who are the poster children for Doing It Right. From first spotting the dilapidated mess to marketing it via social media and the web, they made all the right moves; they created another anchor in their small community and a home away from home for me.

Thank you, all, for inspiring me and giving me what I needed to keep getting up in the morning. (You especially, Gwen Bell. Can't believe it took me this long to make your acquaintance.)

And now, back to the business of excavation...

xxx
c

*Yeah, I know that's not the real term. Gotta learn me some REAL poets' lingo in 2010.

Wherein I turn in the direction of the music

I've had a semi-ironic appointment with myself on the calendar for a few months now, called "Colleen's Happy Holiday Break."

In case it's not obvious, I'm ambivalent at best when it comes to the season. I do look forward to certain treats, the annual viewing of The Third Man, the delivery of the pears. But on top of the regular-usual seasonal depression, this year and last have been a little brutal when it comes to my backwards/forwards review and goal-planning for one simple reason: I have no idea what I'm doing next.

Or maybe I do, and am avoiding it. I know, for example, that I need to continue letting go of the things I acquired during the accumulative years, all the shit I was buying and trying as I looked outside of myself for my style and my wants and my definition*. I know I need to really and truly (and literally) close the books on my moribund graphic design business, something I'd already be fighting because of my perennial money issues but that's exponentially (haha) more difficult because it means I really and truly need to commit to the next thing.

What I don't know yet is what the next thing looks like, because there's no track for it. There was a school track, an advertising track, an acting track. Even graphic design was a sort of track: I knew what the jobs looked like, I knew either how to go get them or could enlist help in figuring it out. I'm good at tracks! Maybe most of us are. Given a clear target, figuring out where to point one's guns is pretty simple; without a target, one tends to spend most of one's time bivouacked on the fields of WTF, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and trying to hold the freakouts at bay.**

I have cordoned off these two weeks for search purposes, keeping them relatively free of commitments. The few non-holiday-related ones are my lifelines, the accountability meetups (I'm up to three regularly scheduled ones, plus a one-off). The interior renovations began in earnest yesterday, as I began prep on my annual 100 Things list.*** A tradition that began as a silly exercise has turned into a silly exercise that has me dumping the contents of every memory container in the digital house all over the desktop and sifting through it. Cathartic! And horrifying!

I'm not alone in this, thank gawd. Backwards/forwards values-based planning is all the rage now, and there are wonderful, detailed posts from all sorts of smart folks who are organized enough to have this plan underway, if not already completed. I'm also weighing the possibility of chucking my old program and just rolling with a Happiness Project in 2010. Hey, who couldn't use more happiness, right?

Wherever I end up, though, I start here: me, (metaphorically) naked, my stuff spread out before me under a good, strong light.

Words of wisdom and encouragement (and even commiseration) most welcome...

xxx
c

*Don't get me wrong, that decade of 38-to-48 was wildly important, and I regret very little of it. But to keep scouring the world outside for answers would be like a 14-year-old still playing dress-up from the tatty cast-offs in mom's trunk.

**Okay. No one is dying on these battlefields anytime soon. Bad analogy, perhaps. But likening my mental state to one of the characters from Interiors is too embarrassing even for me, not to mention hopelessly obscure.

***If you've never had the pleasure and enjoy list-y stuff, they're 95% evergreen: 2008 (Part 1 & Part 2) will link you to all the rest. Or let Google do the work for you.

Image by eddiedangerous via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

The collapsing zoom of December

People lavish ink on seasonal blues, that ugly funk so many of us struggle with this time of year as we deal with the double whammy of forced merriment and short, dark days.

But you don't hear much about the other flavor of freakout that starts licking at us toward the end of a calendar year: Unfulfilled-Potential Panic Disorder.

Come on. You know: that shattering one-two punch that's not unlike the universal dream where one shows up on the last day of school to find a locker full of uncracked books for a course one dimly, if at all, remembers signing up for, and whose final is today*.

Yeah. That dream.

And why not? Everywhere around you, there are happy people riding high, trouble-free, hitting mark after mark. They're wealthy, self-actualized and putting the exact finishing touches on a life they envisioned for themselves way back at this time last year. The only thing they did that wasn't on their list was EXTRA stuff they didn't think to put on it. That's right: they've exceeded their goals a couple of weeks early, just in time to finish up that holiday shopping and kick back with a cold one and a foot massage in front of the fire.

Only they're not. None of them. Not me, not that really successful-looking person sitting there on the next Firefox tab over, not any of us. We're all falling short and we're all moving forward. We all have something going and we're all stuck. We, all of us, each and every one of us, have our basket. And I mean every one of us, without exception. Just because someone is riding high in the moment you have a moment to look at them doesn't mean they are in the moments on either side, when you've turned your gaze elsewhere. Sometimes they're being duplicitous. Sometimes they're putting up a brave face. Sometimes you just caught 'em in the right moment, when the light is perfect and the press is positive and you're the polar opposite because it's fucking late December and fucking dark at fucking five o'clock in your fucking hemisphere and ONCE AGAIN you have somehow and inevitably fallen short of your lofty expectations for yourself.

I talk about this proclivity towards comparison and accompanying despair because I'm susceptible to it. You'd think a third-generation ad gal would have learned a thing or two about spin and appearances and such, and she has, just not enough to remember always and forever, in each and every instant, that comparison truly is from the devil. Much I have learned about the importance of examining things and the joy of creating things and the rewards of letting go of things, but damned if I don't keep getting tripped up on that comparison b.s. over and over again.

Here is the thing that struck me about it recently, though: there are times when it is much, much worse than others. When I am tired, for example, or have been eating poorly and exercising insufficiently. Hungover. Weak. Stressed. Maintenance of the physical plant will net you a little extra oomph even in the best of times, but the lack of it really starts affecting you as you get up there in years. (And I say this at 48, only medium-up there in years.) I'm loathe to get into it because I have not found a non-tedious, user-positive way of discussing it, but I'll keep you posted.

The other thing that can have a deleterious effect is a pressure-cooker season like the end-of-year one. The feeling it gives me is a lot like being trapped in a real-life collapsing zoom**, that vertiginous camera effect Hitchcock was so fond of. The world falls away while an event pulls me forward, or vice versa. It's dizzying and unnerving and so lifelike, it's hard for me to remember that it's just a trick of perspective. But it is; it always is. I attach more meaning to these few weeks just as I put too much weight on getting x, y and z done-done-dunzarelli by some (let's face it) arbitrary day in an arbitrary stretch of days.

Does this mean I give myself a free pass on ever completing anything by a particular date? No. No, it most emphatically does not.

Does it mean that when I feel myself go off-plumb I should take steps to examine what's going on, to stop and breathe, to turn to one of the many sources I have put in place where I can gain perspective and some kind of objective mirror?

Yes. It is my responsibility, my trumps-all "to-do" item, if you will, to bump that sucker to the front of the line. Mission-critical stuff like keeping children fed and the family housed aside, this is the true work of life. And not doing it can really muck up the true meaning of life, which is to experience and to share love, deeply and fully.

One final thing on this heavy topic in the middle of a "light" month: while the answer is simple, essentially, to put the puppy on the mat, where "puppy" is one's attention and "the mat" is "where that attention should be," it ain't easy. Writing helps. Friends, too, especially the long-term, touchstone variety. Ditto that laundry list above, filled with disgusting, earth-bound stuff like exercise. Persistent issues, as always, should be addressed by a professional skilled in the nutjob arts.

Mostly, though, it is perspective.

This is December. December is hard. Sometimes especially so, because we're made to believe it should not be.

Go easy on yourself, y'hear?

xxx
c

*Bonus anxiety points if you're free-falling your way to the locker in the altogether.

**I have looked all over the Internet and have found no mention of "collapsing zoom," the term that whomever it was who first told me about the zoom-in, dolly-back camera move made famous by Alfred Hitchcock and overused by first-year film students ever since. Apparently, it's "dolly zoom" and I was misinformed and what the hell else is new? I don't care: my blog, my rules; "collapsing zoom" stays. Who knows? Maybe we can popularize it into wide usage together, you and I.

Image by Kyle May via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Back to work

I freak out a little most Sundays.

Because while I generally work over the weekends, it's a low-stakes, puttery, solo kind of working, with few interruptions from or demands by the outside world. What I do, I'm choosing to do; what I engage with, I'm choosing to engage with.

Yes, it's always a choice. But you know what I mean: while emails can drift into your inbox on any day of the week and the phone can ring at any time (especially, these days, if it's a telemarketer), provided you've established firm boundaries, the expectations that you will leap to respond over the holy days of Saturday and Sunday are even more minimal than the trickle itself.

So while on the surface my freakout is about the quiet ending and the noise beginning, and under that, the freakout is about my being unable to manage things, under it all is my fear that this time, I will not be able to pull it off: this time, I will suck. Or more specifically, that this week, Monday's essay will suck.

This is the eternal problem of making anything good, at least for those of us into measurement: it will always either be the best thing you've done yet or it will fall short (or, I suppose, it could tie with the best thing, but that's just forestalling doom). There are no other choices. And while there is that momentary high of having done better, once you are there, there is only up, or down. Up is a cocksucking boulder; down is unthinkable. Hence, freakout.

There are ways of mitigating this: producing more, for one, and dealing with your shit openly, for another. A big reason why I committed to writing five days a week on the blog is because the more I do something, the less precious each individual instance of it is*. And the more I honestly explore what a crazy mess I am, the less I act out on my crazy mess-ness**. When I look back at the chronic creative constipation of my 20s and 30s, I can see very clearly where these two things intersected: I barely produced because I was afraid that everyone would see my hackity-hack idea for the hackity-hacksterness I knew it must be, ergo I had fewer and fewer ideas, which just drove the stakes ever higher. Ugh. The only things I want back from my youth are my screaming-fast metabolism and the money I spent on handbags and shoes worn once and joylessly.

Sundays don't just exist at the end of the week, of course. If the end/beginning of weeks is rough, the end/beginning of years and projects can be completely stultifying. And let's not forget the panic at the end of a project, job, vacation or any other substantial time sink. I was such a wreck by the time the night of my first Ignite experience rolled around, my bowels were near liquid; almost immediately afterward, when I found out over the phone with The BF that the video feed had gone down during my talk (and that, I mistakenly thought, there meant there would be no record at all of my effort), I started bawling so uncontrollably, I had to hang up and go walk it off. I write about change and fear so much because they figure so significantly in my life, I couldn't (and wouldn't) make this stuff up.

It's crazy hard to keep making stuff, but it's unthinkable to stop. While one part of my head always has the recurring smackdown-joke from Stardust Memories reverberating through it, the hero's fans wistfully recalling his "earlier, funnier movies" while at a film festival celebrating his oeuvre, the other revels not only in the sly, creative joy of making such a meta-joke but in knowing that Woody Allen went on to make a slew of other, equally-great-to-greater films that ran the gamut, genre-wise. You don't get to make a Match Point or Hannah and Her Sisters if you can't stomach the prospect of a few Shadows and Fogs.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the good sense of artists keeping bankers' hours, of having boring structure in one's exciting (haha) writer's life. The container makes the art possible, especially after the mad energy of youth passes. So, like Allen, you write out your two screenplays per year on yellow ruled pads, longhand, while lying on your bed, marking time in between with regular doses of tennis and clarinet. Or like Chaplin, you leave the French beach in the afternoon to head up to your room to write, because that's what you do. Or like Tharp, you mark up your fresh boxes with the launch of a new project, and start filling them up with stuff.

And it's not just the container aspect and the rigorous discipline that benefit creative output: it's the turning of creativity into the regular-usual, and avoiding the dread terror of this next blank page, this next fresh canvas, this next blue sky. It is one of many blank pages, canvases and skies.

One of many Mondays. The regular-usual.

Just another crazy worker, swinging another crazy hammer...

xxx
c

*Kind of like having a passel of kids against the almost-certainty of losing one or two to some epidemic or another, back in the olden days. Only not, because I hardly expect any of my blog posts to work the farm or support me in my old age.

**This has the double-edged advantage of facilitating productive output and beating people who would "out" you off at the pass.

Image by kasrak via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Why I write

I have written well and wretchedly,
in crayon and ink,
with bombast and aplomb
and fear underneath.

I have written on the tops of toilet seats
from the depths of despair
and in glass-walled buildings
while my soul was asleep.

I have written for praise
and for dolls
and for cash
and for naught.

I have written for the stage
and The Man
and the screen
and the hell of it.

I wrote
because it is what I was taught
and how I was wired
and why I might be here.

But I write
because it is the only way
I know how to sing.

xxx
c

Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Raincoats, running-on-the-beach dresses and what you really want

My mother had a saying she used to toss out when she wanted me to (not) do something, a line that alerted me to the existence of passive-aggressiveness some 20-odd years before we formally met:

"They're your feet."

Served up with a shrug in the most detached of tones, that line always-but-always got me to put down the Shoe of the Moment (blue Dexters with the white topstitching excepted. And yeah, I regretted those blue shoes pretty much from two months after I got 'em until I finally, mercifully outgrew them.)

Did her words sting? Do I wish that one of the 87 zillion good-to-genius books out there on communication today had existed back then, and that she would have read it with an intent to learn? Duh. Mom would have killed on Twitter, but being her daughter was often an arduous and spirit-crushing job.

Still, in her crisp, acid, Mom-koan way, she was, I believe, trying to impart this truth: live in the moment, but abandon context at your own peril. Yes, God protects fools and little children, but if you make a steady diet of Doritos, put QVC on speed-dial, or otherwise continue to stick your finger in the light sockets of life, eventually He'll hand you over to the Karma Department. And trust me: there is no reasoning with those guys.

So what is context in this, uh, context?

Cultivating a sense of your finiteness and puniness, for sure. Remembering what has come before and using that to stay aware of what might come next. Paying attention and methodically exposing yourself to new things. Deepening your understanding of others. Expanding your ability to meaningfully connect with them. All the stuff that makes life worth living, and that makes it an ongoing pain in the ass. (Like you're not going to float a sigh of relief onto that last breath? Come on.)

Part of what has been so painful about this decluttering/excavating phase I'm muddling through is that each thing added to the "donate" pile reminds me of the short-sighted assery I default to without constant vigilance. Impulse buyer, thy name is "communicatrix"! From books to clothes to iPhone apps, I must have it, and now. One can do this on a budget, believe me; they have a door in the drop-off area of Out of the Closet that leads right to the showroom. And if you shop fast enough, you can get out of there before your old stuff hits the floor.

Have I examined this proclivity? Oh, yes. Yes, I have.

Partly, it's a buffer against existential dread, of course. The more more more, like booze or drugs or what-have-you, helps to fill that empty space inside, albeit temporarily. The prescription for that kind of consumption is to still myself and fully feel the feeling, then (usually) to go make or do something. (Or sometimes, hug the dog.)

Partly, it's hope. I will learn piano/Portugese/vegan cookery. Or take more vacations. Or take a vacation. My old art director had a penchant for what she called "running-on-the-beach dresses": floaty, impractical things that whispered "take me to the beach so some handsome, romantic fool* can rip me off and make wild, passionate love to you in the surf."

What helps now when I reach for something with this intent is context, from a recall/projection standpoint. What have I committed to already? How do I feel about how full my schedule is? How will I feel if I add this to-do to my list?**

Finally, and this is the one that's new to me, it's holes in the fabric of my self-knowledge. In the absence of a clear plan and well-defined goals, it's very easy to make grabby, stupid decisions. And to have those, one has to really know oneself. I know parts of me, but not the whole of me; in middle-age, I am finally seeing facets to myself I never saw before.

My hatred of dressy raincoats, for example: a loathing so deep, my wallet is better off choosing umbrellas and dampness. I have lost count of the number of dressy raincoats I've bought and not worn in my life, yet still, I persist. Because everyone has to have a dressy raincoat, right? Even people who live in deserts need them. For Traveling.

Which is why, in the midst of decluttering and holiday partying and end-of-year-ing I committed to a bit of an excavation/illumination process with two friends and our respective copies of another friend's book. Initially, I questioned the value I'd derive from it; I'm disdainful of style in general except for what I've already found suits me, more interested in getting on with things as the years pile up and time available runs down. Now, several hours into the process, I'm a convert, and a humbled and contrite one as well. Yes, it is effortful to pull all of these things out into the light and look at them, but there have been enough surprises and revelations thus far that I'm now certain I'll come out of this being able to do more with less, and possibly with an added note of grace.

They are my feet, you see, and they carry me on my path. Attention paid to one cannot help but illuminate the other...

xxx
c

*Possibly your current honey; probably not. The further out the fantasy, the greater the chance that you're out of touch with more than just your need for a break from work.

**Or, in the case of running-on-the-beach dresses, both a schedule check and a loop back around to existential-dread land.

Images by lewing via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Circling

If you've never hung out at Tumblr, you're missing quite a lot.

Not my Tumblr, but Tumblr, period. Tumblr is a blog engine or CMS or community site or all of these things, rolled up in one. It's a long-form Twitter or a cool Facebook stream. It's blogs minus the b.s. It's a ton of people you don't know (but most of whom you want to, after spending a little time there) throwing out all kinds of random items. Which means it's a crazy patchwork quilt of ideas, notions, nonsense and genius, served up in words, pictures and video, all embedded in a crazy, ever-flowing stream of awesome. Really. It's the tits.

Anyway.

Last week, in the sleepy, post-eating haze that was Thanksgiving weekend, Merlin, who is very back into poetry these days, unlike those of us who (sadly, shamefacedly, never were), has been dwelving into Richard Hugo of late. In the course of his travels, he turned up a nifty (and terrifying) exercise that another poet, Ted Roethke, used to give his students, to keep them on their toes. A hateful, vexing, difficult exercise which Hugo twisted to make more difficult, and which Merlin then put his own spin on, dubbing it the Roethke-Hugo Exercise (and, to be fair, threw down himself).

I do not consider myself a real poet, but I am highly competitive and love puzzles of a certain stripe. So of course, I immediately sat down and applied myself to the task. I took over an hour, and broke many other rules. But boy, howdy, does an exercise like this ever get the blood moving after the tryptophan. It's enough to make a gal apply to grad school.

xxx
c

Circling

Tough eye, cool and blue,
unwavering, insensate,
cuts to the red part of my heart,
names the rock in my throat
with swift, soft precision
that surprises me awake.

Am I ruined? No more than
the sky a cloud curves across
or the tamarack a hawk circles
and, with a kiss goodbye,
laughing in that haunting way,
fades into what is left of the days.

I hug to me your soft nonsense,
lugging it and all the mud you
sling at my indifference,
letting you bruise the truth
of what I thought I knew
against the rock of recognition.

Image by tommy the pariah via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

You're nobody till somebody hates you

There's a way things work.

F'r'instance, as part of your ongoing excavation of Mt. What Comes Next, you'll have a series of serious and heartfelt conversations about where you're headed, and how you're sure if you're going to keep moving forward you need to jettison some of this crap you've hauling around with you even though you're damned if you know where all of this forward stuff is leading to.

And the people you have them with will bring up this or that, but especially the column you've been writing for over three years, and ask you "Well, what about that? Is it really serving you anymore?"

And your answers will range from "I don't know" to "Every time I swear I'll quit, I get another note about how much it's helping" to "Ugh."

And the "Ugh." comes from what you do know: that this project you started as an experiment, as the impetus to write seriously every month (or as seriously as someone who pens songs about the effect of flatulence on butter can write), and to do it on a deadline, on one particular topic to a particular audience, has hit The Dip, and you're not sure if it, indeed, is The Dip, or just time to go. You can stay anywhere you want, but you can't stay here.

The suggestion is gently made that perhaps you consider (excuse me while I lift this cheek) monetizing the project. I mean, sure you've scored a whopping c-note for every 1,000-word gem you've submitted, but maybe something more than shared-hosting-space money. Maybe turning it into a book that said actor-types could mark up and carry around, or even buy from you as a token of their apparent appreciation (they're quite appreciative via the email and the Facebook and even the rare in-person opportunities). Or maybe with a little imagination and effort you could even turn it into (again, excuse me, it's the beans) an information product, a "teleclass" or "webinar" or "electronic download" exchangeable for cash-money via the PayPal.

And a part of you agrees that yes, of course you could but also that no, that just doesn't feel right. Not quite. Not now.

And as you think about pulling the trigger on your resignation, a few more thank-you emails roll in, and your submission deadline looms, and you think, "One more month. I'll just table it for one more month."

And then you get a piece of hate mail.

You've heard about these, of course, from your friends who are well ahead of you on the path to that mythical land of Internet Fame; over the years, you yourself have received the odd, gripe-y comment from an Aspy reader off his meds. But this one? This one is venomous. It accuses you of all sorts of indecencies you fear and despise, and in sneering, disdainful, umbrage-laden rage: hackery, for starters, and bad intent (isn't that what all anonymous disgruntled folk claim?) but worst of all to you, it accuses you of irrelevance.

Irrelevance. That, you have a harder time shaking off.

Because you have, after all, been out of the game yourself for over four years, which is something you not only share openly and often, but which, of late, has been nagging at you as well: how great a level of utility can you provide your audience of working and even aspiring so-and-so's when you yourself kissed it all goodbye four years ago? And yes, you still regularly receive grateful, gracious, loving notes out of nowhere from strangers and former colleagues, thanking you for your work, describing in heart-warming detail how it has helped them in real and significant ways, telling you how happy they are to have information served up in a way that feels caring and makes them feel cared-for.

Irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.

There are mirrors everywhere. Some of them are in darker, danker dressing rooms than you care to visit, but when you find yourself staring into one, you must still look at what is looking back at you and ask the question: What of this is the truth? And what must I do about it?

xxx
c

Issues of focus

I'm not sure if it was my friend, Merlin, who led the charge, but at some point, many of us, myself, included, gave up on streamlining, optimizing and other kinds of organizational navel-gazing and started turning our attention to attention.

What it was made of. What obscured it. What attracted ours.

As things accelerate and old structures crumble around us, a shift like this makes perfect sense. Power and money still mean something, but the means to them has changed quite a bit, a phenomenal amount in my working lifetime, to the point where I regularly find instances of people caught with their pants down all over the Internet, not to mention real life. The speed of life and the volume of stuff that fills it is staggering, which is to say I (and I daresay you, and that fella sitting next to you) regularly stagger under the weight of it.

And stuff. Let's talk about that stuff, shall we? While I was too much of a pantywaist-commie-pinko-hippie to join the Masters of the Universe in the bloodthirsty late-last-century race to see who died with the most toys, I dined on their dime and drank their whiskey. Mea culpa, and I've been actively taking steps to address it ever since I realized my folly, from getting rid of shit to riffing less often to putting more time into what I really care about.

At the risk of sounding like a new age spongecake, the chief questions seem to me to be:

1. What is getting in the way of what I want?
2. How do I remove those obstacles?

What is missing from this list is, of course, the all-important "What do I want?" To those who would point this out, I would say either, "You already know that part, bub" or "If you don't know, try getting rid of some stuff." The excavation process is subtractive: heaping more crap, even really well-written or beautifully-made crap, is going to hurt you more than it helps. As one who spent many, many years wandering through the psychic equivalent of the Container Store, looking for neat solutions to organize my neuroses rather than haul them into the light where they might shrivel or at least be sterilized, I know. I know. That cheap crap from China is mighty alluring on the surface.

But now, well over two years into this wandering-in-the-desert shit, I'm here to say that there is no magic book or info product or life-changing seminar, or, yes, blog, that holds the answer. Like Dorothy, ain't nothing in that black bag for you, son. Go declutter a closet, or take a long walk, or send that email to your friend with the great shrink and begin the sometimes-arduous, always long process of excavation. Because your inability to get traction or to focus is directly related to the myriad ways you've chosen to numb yourself.

Nobody's blaming anyone, least of all me. I am currently grappling with a layer of clutter so tacky and tenacious that I can only hope it indicates the imminent breakthrough my clutterbusting friend, Brooks, seems to believe. Yet this layer feels as whisper-thin as it does dense, so that at the end of this all, the happy ending I'm trying to hold in front of my heart, I will look at this discarded skin/film/filter that separated me from my wholeness with wonder and disbelief: This? This was the Supposably Huge Thing standing between me and the Next Thing? That's it?

The greatest gift you can be given is to be born with that clearly defined passion inside you. If you are so blessed, you must pay back the gods by pursuing that passion with laser-like focus in a way that helps the rest of us.

The consolation prize is ruthlessly, bravely, systematically eliminating what obscures that passion, keeping yourself sharp and light and open along the way.

Either way, focus is mandatory. Focus is the means by which all the good things happen (and, yes, the bad, but those are not concerns of ours right now).

Focus. Eliminate. Focus. Pursue.

xxx
c

Image by Thomas Shahan (Opo Terser) via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Useful

When I had few things I collected them to fill the spaces that felt scary and fix me in space so I would not float away

Now I have things enough to know you collect nothing but are yourself the collection

All the thoughts you've thought and the feelings you've felt and the stories you've shared make you your own curio cabinet, collection, and all.

Much more fulfilling than things you can hold much less dusting than things you acquire

What is truly useful is what you carry in your head and your heart on the way home

What is truly extraordinary is the home you find in empty space.

xxx c

Image by roosterfarm via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Poetry Thursday: Simple, not easy

To take away
subtract
remove
excavate

To open up
share
extend
love

To choose
with care

tend to
with patience

mind
with attention

To ask
each and every time
"Is this the truth?"

and to go back
and ask again
until it is

What will
you possess
apply to the enormous task
in front of you
every moment
of every day.

If you can do what is simple
the rest
is easy.

xxx
c

Image by Adrien Nier via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.