Do I Really Need to Do That?

A lot of–maybe all of–the things we feel we have to do and stress about, we actually don’t have to do—or at least we don’t have to stress about them.

I think our belief that we need to just labour on through a certain amount of things in life stems from the way we learned to be in this world as children. We learned to listen to adults and simply do what they said at some points, even if it was against our will. We were coerced into being quiet or sitting still or enduring long visits with family friends. When we grew into independent adults, our realities changed, but our beliefs remained the same; namely, we felt we still had to do things we didn’t want to do, but we never fully acknowledged this or considered that it might be incorrect. I see this holding-on of old beliefs as similar to the instinctual, flight-or-flight part of the brain that we as a human race don’t need as much as we used to because our world is safer now, yet it still perks up at small signs of danger and causes us undue stress.

It can feel a little disorienting to no longer force yourself to do the certain uncomfortable or inane tasks throughout the day, but you’ll find that with the natural unfolding of things, the necessary tasks will still get done, and you will have more fun and learn more while doing them. It’s hard to trust this and it may take a few real-life instances for the idea to sink in, so keep your eyes open for it. For example, I was stressing about how to get a few more chairs to host people at my house this weekend, when I called a friend to chat and forget about the problem for a while. Soon, I told her about my problem in an offhand way and she reminded me of some chairs I had in a less-frequented room. I couldn’t believe the problem has been solved so easily just by doing what felt good. I don’t advocate doing what feels pleasurable, but doing what feels good to you (in this case, getting some space from the problem and going to have a good time chatting with my friend) can’t be a bad thing. The moral: If the old way isn’t working, find a new way. This isn’t childhood anymore and there is no reason to do something exactly as someone has told you to do it or “as it is done” if you don’t feel that’s the right thing.

This theory traces a fine line between being lazy or unmotivated, and being relaxed to allow and enjoy what you do moment-to-moment. In the same vein, you can go forward and do everything you have previously done, and just do it in an un-stressed way. Have you ever seen a child whose parent has given them a gift, money or card to give to someone else? Have you seen how nervous the child (often) is, how he or she dreads to do this task but doesn’t see any other option so he or she goes through with it. Then the receiving adult usually finds humour in how nervous or shy the child was, and that’s the whole exchange. From the outside, we can see that the child was stressing way too much over this task, but I clearly remember a time when I didn’t have that insight, and when I was terrified to give something to a guest or relative.

So, be sensitive of the pressure that you put yourself under and consider if it is really necessary—the act or the way in which you are going about it. I wish you luck with it, be attentive.

Yes Man

There are so many ways to live. You can live as a libertine seeking the closest path to pleasure at any moment. Or spend a lifetime as a guarded nun prizing all the things you have never done. You can be a “just say yes” person or carry around a banner that reads “no means no.” If you are a “no” person, you probably live this way to protect the things you love from infringing time-wasters.

However, saying “no” is addictive partly because of the immediate reward. You get instant free time, solitude, and the perfection of something undone with all the potential of an idea and none of the compromise of reality. As a “no” person, you may grow to do less and less of the things you think you dislike, and also less of those things you really do like because perfectionism begins to take over. Life becomes something to edit, to clean, to maximize in terms of efficiency. You may become short-sighted, questioning the importance of something before it has become apparent to you, and therefore losing amazing experiences. This debate over the “yes” and “no” approaches to life is very relevant in the career search of people, especially young people. Young adults tend to know exactly what they don’t want to do and can see a small detail of a career description as a blinding red flag rather than something to be worked around to reach an improved and personalized job description.

To me, one of the main joys of actually doing things—besides the absence of over-rumination—is that I transition from a state of criticism about other people’s actions, art and ways of life, to a sense of admiration for what they have done despite numerous challenges. After writing, I recognize the workmanship in every sentence and I appreciate a much wider pool of books than I do after I haven’t written for a week. Not doing—in other words thinking, planning, analyzing, reflecting, critiquing—all train the mind to catch errors in your own thoughts and others, without feeling the (lovely) burn of actually inventing good works of art, actions and ways of communication yourself.

I continue writing these blog posts although not many people are reading yet because it’s nice to struggle. I like it better than keeping up with my schedule. It’s nice to be inefficient at something and watch minutes dance by as I stare at a blank page and shoot down ideas before opening my heart to imperfection.

Meditation for … you.

There are other ways to meditate than to sit with a straight spine in lotus pose. By this, I don’t mean that if you lack the dedication and willpower to choose the best way of meditation, than you can wimp out with an alternative, I mean that for a lot of people sitting meditation is not the most effective way to meditate.

I’ve been reading a book about teaching children to meditate, by David Fontana and Ingrid Slack, and learning that there are hundreds of different ways to meditate and each of them may be the most effective way for a given child.
The same is true for adults. Depending on what you want to get out of meditation and your reasons for practising it, the definition of what meditation itself is expands or contracts. If you meditate for physical health, i.e. to release tension, improve digestion, increase the number of antibodies produced and heal from disease, then the most effective form of meditation for you may be a body scan. In this type of meditation, you lie or sit down and spend some time focusing your attention on your body as it is now. Then you focus on each part of your body with a curiosity, and open, non-judgemental attitude. Your come to reinhabit your body and are able to listen to its signals more clearly, as well as completely rid it of stress periodically and improve your ability to stay calm and healthy during ongoing periods of stress.

If you practise meditation to be more in the moment but sitting on a cushion for a half hour every day doesn’t work for you, you may find that being present in another activity—like petting your dog or talking with a friend—is more helpful to you. I don’t mean you should meditate the easiest way, but meditate in the way that brings you something on the long-term. Results from your meditation may not appear quickly (and meditating for results can set your practice off balance), but there should always be some degree of personal purpose in your practice, and some reflection that tells you you are doing something good for yourself.

Dropped Stitches on the Page

In many of the things we do, we can get away with working hard. We can face a challenge and overcoming by working the same way we have been, but simply working with more effort, determination and devotion. When we face a challenge in writing, however, when we run into a road block or plot hole or lack of interest in our own story, this is not a demand to push through harder. A challenge that arises while writing a novel is like a dropped stitch while knitting: it is small and only appears alarming to the very attentive craftsperson who knows that if this small error is not tended to it will increase to the point of bringing down the whole piece.

An example is when the writer starts to become disinterested in his or her characters. This indicates that the characters are not developed enough in his or her mind, and therefore, not near well-developed on the page. Likewise, if you feel like the plot is dragging, then your readers, who have no investment in whether or not you sat down to write for an hour every day, will feel really hesitant to commit to your story and to care about it. If you, as a writer, feel unsympathetic towards any of your characters, if they are stereotypes of bad examples and you address them with bitter humour, this may be a sign that they need some shining quality as well so that they can start to grow on the reader.

I love that writing gives me the time and the outlet to play and learn about my mind and the world around me. A lot of the time, writing feels like: worrying about how good the story is going to turn out, wondering if this is a valuable use of my time, questioning all of my habits and beliefs, both encouraging myself to write unencumbered by my inner critic and simultaneously to step away from the clichés. Yet, I keep doing it because it is the hardest thing for me, and therefore rewarding.

Writing and Multilingualism

Today, I have no straightforward writing tip, no advice to give you, just questions and ideas. I’m simply curious about writing and bilingualism/multilingualism.

In the past, I’ve been hesitant to live in a non-Anglophone country and to focus too much on learning another language. Now, after spending a year in Montreal, studying English literature, I’ve experienced complete rupture to my old habits and approaches to writing. I think that was a good thing.

One of the most dragging elements to my writing was repetitive sentence structure. I learned this through my favourite professor, Robert Lecker, who would return essays to me with the first word of almost every sentence circled because there would be four consecutive “The”s or three consecutive “She”s to start my sentences. I suppose there is a simple tip in here: if your sentences are consistently beginning the same way, chances are you are limited in the sentences structures you are creating. When you force yourself to reroute your first words of sentences, you force yourself to chance the structure of the sentence, the order in which you reveal your thoughts, and the overall delivery and emphasis of your sentiment. The thing is, a second language can open your mind to new sentence structures.

Poetry, and especially poetry in another language, will make you forget that there are any structure conventions in your language. You learn that pronouns aren’t important. Learning to think and compose sentences in another language is like finding a back door into communication. It is liberating to not have to use pronouns in certain cases; it is interesting to ponder the effect of gendered nouns and the lack of gendered nouns in English. Learning another language will make you notice fine things about your first language that you never appreciated before—and that is precisely what improves one’s skill as a writer.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge professes that imagination’s power is to break up things and to piece them back together to create brilliant works of literature. Fancy, on the other hand, is weaker because it can only piece together pre-existing words and ideas. Learning another language is bound to be a wrecking ball to your primary language, especially if you choose to immerse yourself in your new language. That demolishing and restoration of your first language may be just what you need to grow and change the way you approach writing.

Plot Propeller: Setting

So you’ve got good characters and maybe a vague idea of the end scene or moral or transformation which you want your story centre on, but how to specify those generalizations? How to find ways to exhibit your characters’ traits in myriad provoking ways? The trick to regenerative inspiration for your story, that is all unified and bound together, is to strongly visualize the setting.

The setting is where opportunities arise. Whether impediments or shortcuts to your character’s goals, the setting creates realistic events that have continuity with the larger plot.

A setting can be real or fictional, and it can change as time goes on or as the characters move. A character’s chancing perspective can reflect a setting differently. Whether the location is actual or imaginary, do your research. For a made-up place, this means brainstorming and, when you’re ready, making lots of decisions. Creators often have trouble pairing down ideas precisely because it feels like pairing down. They feel like less can happen when the writer makes more decisions and specifications about the setting. The opposite is true: the more we choose details with a firm hand, the more ideas and possibly flower from that feeling of assuredness. We take a step, and the path becomes clearer. If we are always speculating about the path when we are at the start, we will be able to see less.

If your setting is an actual place, say a real town in the present or the past, you have an anchor to ground your story and feed your story with indispensable doses of reality. My story takes place in Lauterbrunnen. I have never been to Lauterbrunnen but I love it already. I watch YouTube videos about this town, look at Google images, research facts, and store them in my mind for when I write. (I don’t recommend researching while you write unless you want to end up on Facebook or at your e-mail inbox within minutes.) Lauterbrunnen is a place where my characters feel comfortable, where there are tourists to meet, languages to learn and fresh air to breath. If I am ever at a loss of what to plot next in my story, I just put myself in this town and imagine what very real occurrence would happen next.

The town itself becomes a character, too. The mountains have a presence, which is read and misread. Just as characters judge each other, they use the mountains as symbols for different things in their individual lives.
All in all, a setting can be a huge plot propeller if you feel a little lost in the generalizations of your story—bring it down to earth, down to a very specific piece of earth, real or imagined.

An Idea for Writers

Writers have heard the maxim “show don’t tell” so many times that we definitely would have stopped telling—or we would have written a story told in a rebelliously over-“telling” manner—if it were easy to do. But telling helps us as we write. It keeps us oriented, on track, and signposts the story for us. For readers, however, telling is an unwanted hand to guide them when they really just want to run free, work their minds and have an adventure.
So, to keep both writer and reader pleased I came up with a “split-screen” method of writing. (By “split-screen” I mean that I open up my notebook and work differently on the left page than on the right page.) On the right side, I write for the actual work, I pause to smell—and describe—the roses in the scene, not worried that I’m going to forget my point because on the left side, I am making notes of what is actually happening, in simple sentences and words. This technique isn’t for everybody, but if you like to take your time while writing and you feel that the pressure of remembering what is occurring in the scene or your reason for writing it and how it works in with the larger plot is distracting you then you may want to put little prompts for yourself only on the left page. I do often this because I’m guilty of is hinting at a story detail and then giving it away clearly. For example:
‘I’m fine, Joe, please just get off of my lawn!’ Marvin had a short temper.”
Keeping your tell page separate from your show page will give readers that invitation to read with care and attentiveness. Without too much telling, the mysterious aspect of the story will remain intact, that sense that it all came together without the writer knowing full well what was going on. Showing, instead of telling, is what makes readers and critics remark that a book seems like a manifestation of the artist’s subconscious—which probably contributes a large portion of the story as well, not to steal its thunder. The point is, when you separate showing and telling, you keep some of the framework out of the shared work and you tend not to over-signpost and not to create a heavy narrative tone that distances the reader from the realism of your story. It may also help you to stay on track and avoid rushing through your writing to make sure you don’t lose your ideas.
This technique is also handy when you want to write a scene in a very disorienting, decentralized way—from the tree’s perspective, or with no pronouns, or something like that. You can make the effect on your show page, and keep your goals and checkpoints straight in your mind on your tell page. Do make sure that you are not leaving any crucial information off of your show page (the one that other people will read), and on the other side, don’t belabour a point or a scene or a physical description too much just because you have your grounding point of the tell page—your reader won’t have that and might not like a five-page head-to-toe catalogue of a minor character. Use your judgement. I hope this technique helps you!

The best way to get out of the mind…

…is to get into the body. If you are worried or anxious or stressed out in a way that isn’t helping you to do what you are trying to do, you’ve got to get out of the headspace. Of course, it still exists, just as pain does when we are sick, but there is a way to exist near the pain or the worry—right where you are—and not be as bothered by it. As in any situation, it can be difficult to move away from something without a vision of what you are moving towards. Persistently trying to get away from one thing can leave you circling in the mind-states of worry and distraction that you seek to divorce. Worrying that you are worrying, fearing fear itself and stressing about stress are examples of this. A clear and simple way to move beyond the mental clutter and into reality is to aim to inhabit the body. You can start by wondering about the feeling of every point of contact that your body currently has with the outer world: your seat on the chair, or feet on the ground, your toes in your socks or shoes or twiddling in the air, the hair brushing your neck, your shirt on your belly, the wind on the hairs of your arms. Then add movement—“mindful movements” as Thich Nhat Hanh calls them. You can stretch or run or do aerobics while feeling all of your body or focusing on feeling a part of your body. Stretch out your neck, roll your head around gently, feel your face from the inside to discover how much tension you are holding in it–do this a couple times per hour. Likewise, Rick Hanson promotes “micro-breaks” throughout the day to go deeper and deeper into what you are doing and therefore do it effectively. For micro-breaks, Hanson suggests attention to breath. I believe regular stretching is effective too to focus the mind again as it begins to spin off kilter.

Writing is Reading

Playing music on an instrument involves partially playing and mostly listening. Musicians have an intention for a sound or mood, and the keep their ears open to see if they are executing that effect. Because just having an intent or mood while playing won’t ensure that the listening invokes the same mood in the listener. For some, the concept of abstract visual art is that you capture the mood that you have or have in memory while you are creating. Sometimes the pure emotion works well to portray the emotion, but often a bit more carefulness and patience would help to more effective portray a mood—even one of roughness and urgency.

Likewise, with writing, your intent or mood while writing isn’t exactly what the reader feels while reading. There is often more strategy needed in the delivery. Of course, streams of consciousness or journal-style writing can be more effective when they are raw and off-the-cuff, but for the most part, writing strategically and with attentiveness is more effective than writing while angry to create and angry mood in the writing. Often, especially with prose, it will just come off as sloppy, and the loose style will distract from the emotion rather than contributing harmoniously to it.

Like a musician, you’ll need to use your ear to temper your sound to make sure it is arriving in the real world in the way you intended. Writers in action should be just as much reading as writing. They should listen to their words, their mind and their experiences when they are out and on the page, not just in their head. Yes, this happens in the editing stage, but it is easier and more natural to incorporate a sense of “reading” into every word you select, and as you go along. To me, this means listening to the word after you’ve “said” it and seeing if it encompasses what you are trying to express. If it doesn’t, change the word for another one, or other ones, even make up a word, as long as it says what you are trying to say then you are doing well.

Paradoxes of Energy

In my short life I’ve learned a few things about energy. Mostly, we think of our bodily energy like the fuel in a car, and we try to chide the needle closer to the full side in whatever we do: eating, sleeping and interacting with people. Our energy meters work a lot more like a fickle compass than an automotive fuel meter. While I haven’t got a hint of insight into my fluctuating moods, I’m starting to follow my causes of lethargy and sporadic energy and the right little middle path, so that’s what I’d like to share.

Eating is where the car analogy falls apart because, for my body at least, it is not ideal to be completely full. I feel the most refreshed and positive when I have eaten just enough to feel satiated, or an hour after I have eaten until I am full. I’ve also noticed the certain foods that make me go crazy on some sort of high (raw onions and raisins—but not together). So, eating too much can make you sluggish instead of energetic. It’s the same, you’ve probably noticed with sleep.

If you feel low and slow yet you’ve eaten and slept well, it might be a good idea to exercise, yes, expend more energy. It’s counter-intuitive but some good exercise at the right time can actually replenish your vitally.

On another paradoxical note, Jon Kabat-Zinn attests that a slightly more focused and attentive awareness, as opposed to an idle and lolling one, brings a certain rest and regeneration that is not synonymous with sleep or food. It seems, in practice too, that expending some extra energy in the looking and experiencing of the world, returns more energy to you.

Finally—this one’s for retirees, students in the summer and general weekenders of all ages—total rest and non-productivity is not regenerative. The doing of things that are personally valuable begets more drive and more doing of personally valuable things. It is not a balanced model of rest-and-do, but a snowball effect of reward and re-inspiration! With sleep and eating and exercise included, of course.

If you’re feeling low on energy, step back and re-examine these few energy paradoxes before trying to eat more, exercise less and give up pursuits that you love.