Cui Bono?: Breakthrough tip for the week of 11/21/2016

Pilgram's Hat + Arrow
Matthias Boettrich

Cui Bono? You are a writer. How does your writing answer that question? We are being propelled into the jolly old season of sell and buy, i.e. “Tis the Season of Not Writing.” What really matters? What costs nothing and puts no profits into the bank accounts of the corporations? Perhaps this is the year to give your writing to those you love. Here are responses to last week’s prompt: Write it out. Right it out. First, from Vanessa Nirode:

Right it Out

 What is it they say? Practice anything for 10,000 hours and you’ll be an expert at that thing? How do you keep track of 10,000 hours? I bet there’s an app for that, an app for most anything these days.

I bet, anyway.

Do you think there might be an app to measure heartache? Then, when you reached 10,000 hours of a heart breaking, you’d know you were an expert so it wouldn’t be quite so devastating because then, then, you’d really be able to say, “It’s ok. It’s ok. I got this. I mean, I really got this.”

“I’m an expert now. I know what to do with a cracked heart. My heart has cracked enough to add up to 10,000 hours.”

The real miracle though, perhaps, is that somehow the heart managed to patch itself up enough to keep beating even after 10,000 hours of being hit with a sledgehammer, or a tap hammer, or maybe even the smallest pinprick (cause sometimes that’s all it takes: just a succession of tiny little piercings until they create a fissure, a crack, and – splat, it’s apart again, a big bloody mess, something you think you won’t be able to put back together. But you do. You do.).

And maybe that’s the miracle.

But also, maybe, after 10,000 hours, you might say, “I’ve had enough now. Really really enough and I won’t let any of you get close enough to wield that hammer.” And you, instead build a wall, the biggest one you can, all around the silly beating thing but you’re not yet that good of a wall builder and it keeps toppling and toppling and you build it over and over until finally you’ve spent 10,000 hours building it and you can no longer build it wrong but only, always right. And then you think you’ve won. Finally, now you’ve won.

But nothing is ever that easy. Ever. And one morning in early November you get up early to walk through the darkness and cool air around the corner to the rec center in the park behind your building. You stand in the line with your neighbors, all up waiting for the polls to open, for the chance, the privilege, to vote for a leader.

The line in your neighborhood is diverse and everyone chats and says, “Morning” and some people take selfies and no one, no one, (as you learn later when results are published precinct by precinct,) votes for the big scary loud-mouthed one.

But then the next day you wake up into a surreal version of some dystopian world you’re certain you’ve read about in a book before. Your wall is down and your heart is in a million zillion immeasurable pieces along with a bunch of other hearts. And your city is thrown into some weird version of chaos with barricades and heightened police and military presence that, among many other things, keeps people from shopping at the Gucci on 5th Avenue.

No one knows how to put the pieces back together –or even which pieces belong to them. They’re all just mixed up in a big pile the wind keeps blowing around.

Everyone wants to know why, why. And there is so much news and so much opinion and so much anger. “I didn’t see this coming,” they say. “How could this have ever happened here,” they say.

But you know, you know. And that’s the most devastating thing of the whole mess. Because that’s how it is: fear and the seeds that blame every other one can find for all the wrongs, sprouts quietly among us so that it seems as if its always been there and we don’t notice how big and ominous its gotten. Like when you look at picture of someone from two or more years ago and think, “Wow, your hair was so short back then, it’s gotten so very long now.”

That’s how it grows. Under our noses and right next to us and you would have thought we’d know.

And they say, “No, its ok. We’re not racist. We just want our way of life protected. That’s all. Not to worry, everything will be ok.”

But you know its going to take a really really long time for everything to be ok. Because none of us, none of us, have even close to 10,000 hours of doing this.

And then you start. And you don’t stop.

There is so very much work to do.

And, from Elisabeth Venetiou:

Writing as practice. Running as a practice. There is no finish line. It’s the same idea. But not the same as to practice until you can’t get it wrong. Alex said he thought that meant perfection. I said I thought it meant habit. Such a habit that it, whatever the it may be, is second nature, is attuned with muscle memory, is just something you do like brush your teeth or take out the trash on Monday nights. It is your practice.
I have discounted the value of my writing practice. I believe deeply in Nora Ephron (was she the one who said it?) her words that I don’t know what I think until I write it down. My morning pages mean so much to me and I’m certain that they are rarely entertaining, not beautiful, and often a bloated list of things I need to do. 
But I am 45. I have two children, one in elementary school, one in middle school who are active and beautiful and need to brush their teeth daily (one has braces, flossing is bitch) and help take out the trash on Monday nights. I am most certainly not in this alone. My husband is amazing and gorgeous and a stickler for table manners and needs to put his phone down more often and look up at the people around him. But he steps in to head coach the basketball team when its in jeopardy of disbanding for lack of leadership and he’s reading about how to coach well since his major sport was swimming and water polo. He’s that kind of man. 
My mother left my father then my brother and I were divided between the households. I was raised by a single mother and know what that is. I know how I went from child to confidant, how I grew up quicker and gained street smarts that my children don’t have. How I became my mother’s center of universe in a crushing but powerful way. How our relationship became complex and intimate to the point that it wasn’t a big deal for us to go into the same bathroom at a friend’s house when we both needed to pee. My friend said, “you know, we have other bathrooms.”
No, I am not doing this alone. Alex works, he follows through. We want, ultimately, the same thing for our children. We recognize that the precious, stunning years are fast fast fast slipping by us in day by lightning day.
I still need to practice. I have delayed or redirected my creative energies into the lives of my children, husband, and now I teach. I teach speech and debate full time to middle schoolers. I coach a competitive speech team. I offer an elective on writing a 10 minute play. Those are the flowers popping up in my garden. That’s the soil that requires daily weeding.
My writing practice, my writing practice is based on three morning pages daily to clear my mind. To help me remember to know to focus what I think. I begin projects novels, essays, but don’t finish them. Is that part of the practice too? So many words that don’t go anywhere.
Yet I run many miles and keep ending up back at home. Must be the same thing. To have running be a practice that actually takes me somewhere, I’d need to run and keep going. A Forrest Gump-ian effort from one coast to the next.
Maybe, for me at least, I really do try not to speak for anyone else, that’s what a practice is. Focus, effort, expression, breath, work and ultimately I end up at the same point where I began. The point in the circle where my pen hit the page, my foot hit the ground. I have confused my writing with something to be accomplished. To be done. To be moved forward. Not a circle but a line.
That’s the core of practice for me. Something I do that puts me right back in the starting position the next day. Make dinner, tuck in children with evening rituals, kisses to sweaty foreheads and tucking limbs under comforters. Sleep next to my man, wake and do it all again.
How did I confuse writing with accomplishment? I have published things in very small ways. Nothing earth shattering. How does publishing connect with a practice? Back to running—my friend tells me that my primary metaphors are running, pregnancy and childbirth. Now that my kids are older, some of my metaphors have grown up—I don’t talk much about giving birth anymore, always was a dicey conversation to have. Better to write down my experience—but now it’s teaching, coaching, listening to my children. Love metaphors. 
Back to running. I occasionally step out of the circle and run a race. Same practice of running but the focus is different. This time, I am in someone else’s circle, the race, still doing my practice from my own circle, running. I ran a 2:02 half marathon in October. That’s a line—outside the circle, a point on the line? I was proud and disappointed that I got so close to breaking two hours but didn’t actually do it. Next time.
Next time I sign up for a race and step into someone else’s circle with my practice already in place.
I’m sure this doesn’t make sense to anyone else. I’m confusing my own metaphors here—a practice is a circle where I end up right where I began, when I take my practice “on the road” (race, publish) I am stepping into someone else’s circle. I’ve lost the part about a line and a point on the line. 
Here’s what I like about this so far. One, it’s fun to figure these things out at 5:55 a.m. on a quiet Sunday morning where the only noise is the clanging of the heat warming the house. Two, I understand more why I write and how it is a practice regardless of whether or not I step into someone else’s circle.
I think I blew right past the right and wrong parts of the original quote.

And, Lynette Sheppard:

They call it nursing practice. As if by doing something over and over according to Lippincott’s manual, you will finally get it right.
No one is more right or righteous than critical care nurses. A drop of intravenous medication up or down might be the difference between survival and death. A missed EKG change can trace a path to disaster. Mistakes can not happen, must not happen. No wonder we flame out over and over again in spectacular fashion, lighting up the sleepless nights, ashes and embers clogging our hearts.
Gallows humor helps some. So do liver rounds where all the staff gathers for happy hour margaritas at Acapulco Restaurant. We drink to celebrate “saving” a patient and we drink when we “lose” one. No drivers are designated and we finally leave, each on her own, each of us a potential candidate for the Intensive Care Unit. This kind of coping ultimately isn’t.
Burnout is a gift when you finally come to the realization that you don’t know, that you can never really know what is right, that it is not up to you. It’s a relief to lay down that burden and a joy to then truly find nursing as a practice. Like meditation. Like mindfulness. Like service. We can become caring friends along a journey whose end is a mystery. And that feels completely right.
Note from Mary: If you can’t “think” of anything to write in the week to come, write a message back to our three contributors.

 

 

Share on Your Social Media

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Search My Site

Subscribe to My Blog

Copyright©2019. All Rights Reserved. The content of this writing services website is exclusively owned by Mary Sojourner (Flagstaff, Arizona). Duplication and usage of all literary writing, short stories, writing tips, writing workshops coursework, and mentoring instruction is prohibited without direct permission from the author and writing teacher.

Writing & Literary Website Designed by Reliable Web Designs.