Fear and Power

The wickedly funny David Sedaris confided to People magazine recently that he'd been "here" for almost fifty years and was still afraid of everyone and everything.

An earlier People profile had suggested that he'd gotten over his fears. "An anxious child, he found an outlet for his energies in high school theater and art programs. 'I thought he'd be a normal kid eventually,' his father observes. It took a while."

In fact, Sedaris has made a career and a splendid body of work out of his anxious responses to the world. (See him on Letterman on YouTube.) Instead of wasting energy fighting himself, he uses his peculiarities, his fears as rocket fuel.

It's a strategy that came to my mind once in an unexpected way. Years ago, I found that night after night when I meditated, Gandhi would show up in my mind and say, "Play Chinese checkers." He didn't respond to questions about why.

Then one afternoon in my office I was in a terrible mood. Employing one of my standard perk-up devices, I left to wander for a bit in a nearby antiques mall. There I saw hanging on the side of a booth an old Chinese checker board, with all the dents for the marbles. A voice in my head said: "Use the obstacles to get where you're going."

At that point I remembered how the game is played. In order to move your marbles to their destination, you have to have an opponent in front of you to leapfrog over. You have to "use the obstacles to get where you're going."

And that's what Sedaris has so brilliantly done.





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Blocking Out the Consequences

"Courage is the ability to block out consequences and do what you think you have to do."
Glenn Fitzpatrick, Esquire general
manager, in an essay on his life with Lou
Gehrig's disease

Gandhi said something similar: forget the fruits of your labors, simply do the work and then step back.

How to step back? Not so easy. But I find that the intention itself takes me a long way toward that goal.

What this all translates to for me is: writing without worrying about whether the piece is going to sell. Curiously, satisfyingly, I find writing that way has turned out more easily saleable work.




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Tough Love

“I used to think that self-care meant taking it easy, pampering myself, and avoiding things when stress hit. Now I know that doing the thing I'm most afraid to do is the best way to take care of myself.”
--Cory Fransway, from Judith Wright's More e-zine



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Do Something Extra

Last night, for the sheer fun of it, I wrote the most bizarre little item I've ever written (and there's considerable competition in my oeuvre for that honor.) It was a one-pager, a humor piece (my intent, anyway), aimed at the slot that The New Yorker fills with satire and wordplay.

I won't burden you just now with the details of that story. What I want to say is that it was a delight to do. It wasn't like work at all. Not like revising my long-time novel-in-progress, which has its pleasures but is work.

The light free feeling came because this writing was extra, and I had no thoughts weighing on me about whether the piece was going to turn out to be good, or saleable, or both, or neither. Writing it was a loose unweighted walk, after a day of backpacking. Though it took four and a half hours, a substantial amount of time.

The same principle--do a little something extra--works in other arenas than writing. The book I co-authored with Allan Luks, The Healing Power of Doing Good, notes that people dealing with overwhelming job pressures and looming burnout can ease their feelings sometimes by doing some little useful extra that nobody expects or requires of them.

It works because:
*it puts the power back into the hands of the doer
*it's a reminder of how much fun the work (without external pressures) can be



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Creativity Equals Fearlessness?

Once when I was talking about my novel Sister India at a book club, one of the members made a comment about days when she feels creative.

I thought to myself: Feel creative? What's that like?

I take a rather workaday approach to writing: come into office, sit down at computer, write. There's no special feeling involved.

But today, I have to say, I think I felt what she was talking about. Maybe. What I realized was that I had no sense of dread or hesitation about taking on anything. I felt fairly confident I could do it well enough, whatever it was. (We're not talking about curing cancer, instead about writing paragraphs.)

Many days I start in again on a project in spite of a nettlesome grain of doubt, a feel of driving with the brake on. Once I'm working that goes away. Today it wasn't there at all, don't know why. But the absence of it, I have to say, felt creative. I'd like to work that way every day.

What's your experience? Is this kind of hesitation familiar? Do you simply force yourself past it, as I so often do? Or do you sail into your most challenging work with full glee?



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Flunking Creativity

The Epstein Creativity Competencies Inventory for Individuals just scored my answers on a 5 minute questionnaire. My score: a pitiable 70%!!! This is well below the level where I'm told I should be concerned.

I lost major points for not keeping a tape recorder by my bed at night, and not changing my work environment very often. (My office partner moves her office doodads and arranges flowers and such almost every morning. Me, I check my e-mail.)

Go take the test and see how you come out. It's at the very least a reminder of useful creativity techniques. (But how could I flunk, when I've never run short of ideas?)



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No-Brainer Time Management

I've discovered another difference between boldness and bad planning.

On Saturday morning I drove 5 hours to work with my brother on his house renovation. Got there in time to do about four hours of work. Spent one night. Worked about four hours again. Need I mention the heat?! Then another five hours on the road going home, feeling good. I'd had a good time and really gotten a fine workout.

Monday. Today. I drove up to my office building, turned the car off, and fell asleep. Woke up an hour later in the same position. My office partner driving up behind me hadn't waked me. Neither had the impressive heat in the closed car.

I pronounced myself rested and went into my office, where I felt mildly crazed the rest of the morning and then took a nap of nearly four hours. Which brings me up to the moment and my present conclusion: nothing is gained by making a three day trip in two days. It's going to require three days anyway, at least if one is over the age of 25.

Planning that uses the Evel Knievel approach--going against natural laws, etc.--is probably not the best way.



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Braving Sadness and Sorrow

Recently I was advised to be sad about sad things, that sadness is the root of tenderness. When anger starts to rise, I'm to check and see if the real feeling is sadness.

Well, talk about bold! The idea of voluntarily wandering into that grim and mucky swamp, which is the way I tend to view sadness, is seriously off-putting.

However, thinking of it in combo with tenderness changes the picture. Then its damp-and-wilted-ness begins to seem like aloe healing a burn.



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How to Brainstorm Better

One of my favorite movie scenes is a hands-on brainstorming session in Apollo 13, when the astronauts have a technical glitch ("Houston, we have a problem") and a team of engineers at homebase is given the precise materials available on board the spacecraft in order to patch together a solution. Fascinating and exciting!

There's also a good brainstorming scene in another Tom Hanks movie about an adman (I forget the title) in which the agency staff play office basketball while they toss around ideas. Thinking as a playful team sport.


Excellent article in Best Life magazine's August issue on how to think in cooperation with others. It sets one thing straight from the start: twice as many ideas are generated by people working solo than by a similar number of groups.

However, it's not uncommon to find ourselves in a group problem-solving situation. I did this sort of thing often in ad agencies back when I was freelancing ad copy, and finally got comfortable and happy with it. (Though my favorite kind of assignment was solo: bill us for x hours and send your list of ideas.)

Here are tips from Susan Welsh's "The Road to Eureka," which she takes from Sam Harrison's book Zing! Five Steps and 101 Tips for Creativity on Command.

*use brainstorming to build on and improve existing ideas, rather than to come up with new ones (I've usually seen the reverse)
*keep the group to a max of 5
*start by spending a few minutes on an unrelated exercise, such as finding ways to solve an imaginary problem
*when ready, encourage wild ideas that are focused on the goal
*people should blurt out their ideas, rather than taking turns talking
*allow no critical response to any idea
*don't go longer than an hour
*schedule a second session to allow ideas to perk

This process of fast blurting turned out to be fun once I got used to it. Sort of like pool volleyball. And getting into the swing of it really helps build the boldness muscles.



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Running Behind?

Probably no one feels as "behind" as the writer struggling to get a second novel written and published. Certainly that was true for me; my wrestle with the first and the ongoing business of the third have lacked the dreadful under-the-gun feeling I had before Sister India was released.

In "Success Sucks" U.K. writer Hamish MacFarlane has written a funny and "spot-on" piece about getting over sophomore slump to get going on his second novel.

"...I want to be read. I want people to see my take and say, you’re spot-on about that, and you put it in such a pretty way, too. I know this is true because it’s the opposite of my enduring number one fear of writing, not that I’ll fail to be published but that people will read my work and say, oh you freak, that’s not what the rest of us think at all."

It hasn't been easy for him. It wasn't easy for a lot of us. New kinds of boldness are needed, just when you think you had it made and didn't need all that sort of thing any more.

MacFarlane simply realized that the stories start to form anyway, best to just write them down instead of feeling guilty about not doing it. Plus, he wants to see how the story turns out. This attitude is part of what I think of as distance-runner boldness: endurance.

A note: MacFarlane complains (and you must go read it) about people constantly asking how's that new novel going? That question drove me crazy for a long time before Sister India came out. And then my annoyance faded, don't know how or why.

But I heard a good piece of advice about dealing with it. A woman I know who does strategic planning for movie studios, etc. said: just keep in mind that When's-your-next-one-coming-out? simply means Hello. It's something to say to show friendly interest, not asking you what you got on your report card.




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Twitching

At the time, she thought her elementary school teacher was Jezebel, my friend said at lunch today. In addition to whatever else K. suspected about her teacher, the woman did one thing that was really, really annoying. She allowed no twitching, no finger drumming. She required that the students sit still.

The very thought makes my nervous mannerisms go into full play. (Now taking off bracelet, flipping it around in circles.)

And what a harsh thing to do to a bunch of kids.

But she was right about the twitching, K. says. It sidetracks energy away from the focus of attention. Sitting completely still allows a more intense focus. That's the idea.

I don't argue with that.

However, for me the twitching, even multi-tasking, helps to keep me from a kind of hyperattentiveness that can be as destructive as neglect. This hyper-focus is also known as trying too hard.

Ideally, I'd get rid of the trying too hard, and then be able to sit still, and then take in third grade math in a blinding flash. (Reach for the stars!) But without the near-continuous leg swinging, toe tapping, finger drumming, doodling and twiddling, I fear I'd gain a hundred pounds. Seriously. Steady movement burns a lot of delicious calories.

Anyway, I may try this stillness experiment--I realize now that my right foot is bouncing. But I'm going to be careful with it. I'd be interested in anyone else's experience with the pros and cons of full focus.






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Self-Management

This morning I began an experiment with a new system of my own devising.

I think the matter of "managing" one's self well is pretty much central to everything, not just for freelance writers facing totally unstructured time. Seems to me that a personal management policy applies to every decision anyone makes: whether during "work time" to dig into the novel-in-progress or file tax receipts; whether, at lunch, to get the side of slaw or fries; even whether to give money to a particular panhandling homeless guy. None of these are no-brainers.

Here's my new system: I face each decision with two guidelines. 1) What do I feel like doing? 2) What choice would be "doing right by myself?" I don't get into an inner debate, I just bring these two questions into consciousness and then act.

I started this morning. The noticeable changes so far are that I ate a healthy breakfast and lunch. No fast food at all. And no quart of my beloved Mickey D's Sweet Tea, as is my usual custom. I don't feel deprived at all. I have no regimen I have to stick to; if lard feels like the right thing for supper, then that's what I'll have.

This new system is a blend of two I've tried that don't work: do what I want to and do what I ought to. Neither one of these alone takes me to a very good place. "Ought" leads me to fury and rebellious excess. "Want" leads me to leave off exercise, vegetables, meditation almost entirely.

Some months ago, at the start of the New Year, I announced here that I was moving to a new system which I think of as Act Like You've Got Some Sense or Follow the Will of God. This has worked better than others. And this new approach is simply a way of divining "the will of God." And it doesn't require sense of me all the time. It doesn't require anything.



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On Hating or Not Hating Jesse Helms

In my days as a freelance news reporter, I once shared a car with the late Sen. Jesse Helms and two or three other news people. We rode from one news event to the next in central Raleigh, perhaps a dozen blocks. In that time, the senator was courteous, didn't swear at any of us or try to hog up more than his share of space in the backseat. Getting out at the downtown Holiday Inn, he said a very pleasant thank you for the ride.

A lot of people say they admired the notoriously right-wing and anti-integration senator because he had nice manners and stood by his positions however wrong.

But decent manners and loyalty to injustice are likely qualities of many of the world's worst dictators. His courtesy was not enough to make me admire him. As he swung his long legs around to get out of the car, I could only look at him in morbid fascination, the same way I like to look from a safe distance at snakes and murderers.

The fact that throughout his career he stuck to his dreadful politics--this should make him better somehow? I don't follow the logic.

I'm certainly in favor of forgiveness and have never spent any energy hating Helms. (Though I'm close to finishing a novel about a notorious right-wing racist Southern senator named Billy, who is charming and seductive as well as famously inflexible.)

I do understand friendship and love that transcend politics. I covered the NC legislature for 11 years and care very much about more than one person who has opposed my interests.

So what if I'd worked around Helms regularly, spent more time with him? Would I have been swayed by his personal manner to acting as if his actions and philosophy on race were not so bad?

Ideally, I could like somebody without being moved in the slightest toward supporting their destructive behavior, either in my voting or in my writing. Not easy. Not even easy to monitor in one's self. But it's what we have to aim for, I'm convinced, to actually achieve justice. It won't come from dividing people into categories of good and bad.

I do know I admire anyone who can maintain such a balance of opposing the injustice and still behaving decently to, even drinking coffee with, the unjust. I consider that bold.



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Stormy Lake Adventure

I have an urgent need to tell you my Fourth of July weekend outdoor experience, my small-scale "hero story." Now this episode was not bold, instead mildly stupidly reckless, and yet a fine little adventure with some lasting satisfaction.

Sunday afternoon I felt a strong pull to take my little inflatable Sea Eagle kayak out for a paddle on nearby Jordan Lake. It had been too long, and the sun was shining. Never mind that thunderstorms were predicted.

Once out on the lake, I could see that there was a dark smudge along the treeline on the horizon, but it was only about a foot wide. Intellectually I know that things get larger as they get closer, but I was still sure that with my lightning paddling speed, I'd be able to dodge it. The lake is huge and many-armed; I'd just avoid the weather, if it even traveled in my direction.

I had a particular and exciting goal in mind, finding the mouth of a creek that I regularly drive across a few miles away on my way to work and back. I had a pretty good idea where it would enter the lake.

Well, I'd paddled hard for over an hour, found a beautiful little cove I'd never seen, scared seven great blue herons out of the trees there, cruised along at the edge of a tall thicket of water grass, and still not found the creek mouth, when the rain began to fall. And, in instant, the thunder and lightning were cracking overhead.

I wasn't going to dodge the weather after all, and I was a very long way from anything but heavily forested shore with bits of exposed sand at the edge here and there. Plus, I was using a metal paddle, in the state with the highest number of lightning deaths per year (or so I'm told.)

So I took the paddle apart and used only the plastic blades, one in each hand, and slowly scoop-scooped my way to one of those little strips of sand, just in time. Five seconds after I pulled up onto this sliver of beach, huge wind whipped up and flipped the boat over as a big pelting rain started, and suddenly the lake was all grey surf. The waves were big enough to break and roll, to force water several feet up the strand and under my feet where quickly I'd positioned myself, lying beneath my overturned my boat, holding it down against the force of the wind.

Within moments, I felt cozy under there, a little warmish cave, with hard rain beating down on airfilled compartments overhead and on the sand on either side of me. The sound was like that of a tin roof in a storm, but all within a foot of my face. I could see out from under the edge of the boat and watch the long waves break into white against dark sky.

I'm accustomed to water. I grew up at the beach, living in Wilmington and spending much of my time at Wrightsville, and I continued going along on some surf fishing and deep sea expeditions in my early twenties. And my eldest nephew tried to teach me to surf fairly recently. But it had been thirty years at least since I was so surrounded by the raw edge of the elements. And this time alone, and definitely not in a charter boat.

As soon as I got under the shelter of my dear little boat I found I was immediately deep in trance. I was comfortable in spite of being drenched, and lying half across a broken branch and having one shoulder hanging out in the rain and dealing with some aggressive ants. For most of the hour and a quarter I was under there, I had little sense of the passage of time. I had a feeling of gratitude, for both the shelter and the nature drama, that was almost tangible, like a shawl of warmer air.

I wasn't really worried. The worst likely to happen was that the storm wouldn't let up until late night, and a small embarrassing search for me would begin. Husband Bob wasn't likely to be worried prematurely though; he's not a worrier and has also decided I'm invincible. I hope never to dissuade him.

I didn't want to be rescued, but I did wonder briefly where the bullhorns were. Once, out on this same lake on a sunny afternoon, I was floating in what was essentially a toy boat, an $11 blow-up vessel with plastic paddles that I got at Best Buy. I probably looked pretty ridiculous because the paddles were tiny and the boat not much bigger than an innertube; my legs were stuck up in the air. A huge cruiser chugged up close by, with enough waves to swamp me. From up on the bridge of the boat, a man in some kind of government park service uniform called: "Ma'am, are you all right?" I was just fine. It was a gorgeous day. There was no threat in sight. But on the day when a storm hits and lifts my 30 pound kayak into the air, I saw no crisply nautically uniformed man cruising up alongside. No doubt, he has the sense to stay in on such afternoons.

The rain quit once for about five minutes, then started again, quiet and steady. The thunder gradually became a little more distant. The surf died down. I crept out. I regathered my metal belongings from where I'd tossed them: glasses, earrings, the pole of the double paddle.

I set out on the water again, again using only the blades, one in each hand, one on either side of the boat, to paddle. There was still too much thunder and lightning nearby for me to want to be flashing a metal rod over my head. I don't know that any of my safeguards actually make any difference--I'm going to learn about that before my next storm chase--but I was doing what I could.

It was one damn long dog-paddle before I could even see the paved ramp where I'd left my car. And by the time I got there it was too dark wearing my prescription sunglasses to see anything at all. But the water was deliciously warm, and I found myself talking to it, every few times I dug a blade in, almost as if it were a pet: "nice warm water, such nice water." It felt as delicious as the shawl of air. Good thing: because if I paused in my paddling for a second, I slid backwards fast. The wind was not going my way.

By the time I made it back to the put-in ramp and was onshore deflating The Boat, packing it in the trunk of my car, I was shivering all over, ready for towels and a hot shower and more towels. And I was enjoying a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, in spite of the basic dumbness of the escapade.

This morning, the day after my adventure, I drove across one of the lake bridges coming into town and thought: "My lake." I felt as if we'd spent a night together, this body of water and I. And we very nearly did.

I'd spent afternoons on or beside this lake before, but never so memorably, or to such effect. This trip melted me into the place, and brought back another location where I'd been so connected before.

When I was a kid, I had this kind of lying-in-the-wet-dirt intimacy with my whole neighborhood on Mimosa Place, knew how the grass grew under the drip line of the Lynch's roof, and could draw precise maps of the major branches of a lot of the trees. It's been a long time since I've had that cell-to-cell connection, even though I'm a gardener and love the plot I raggedly cultivate.

I'm glad to rediscover that deep earth-to-human infrastructure, to remember it exists. When it's active it feels like a combo of raw storm energy and puppy affection, born of nothing but intense prolonged close-up attention to the place and dependence on knowing those details. I didn't know I'd missed that feeling. A funny thing to rediscover on an Independence Day weekend.

What I did know, while I was out there, was that I was going to relish telling this story.



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Happy Boldness Day

For people of the USA, there's never a better day than the 4th of July to make a significant and positive bold move. If you do make one, be sure to report it here. It will inspire all.


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Two Free Tickets to a Bold Performance

To the first person to comment here who can plan to attend, I'm giving two tickets to this Saturday's Raleigh performance by the Brussels Chamber Orchestra.

It's the American premier of this group and they are hot; their second American performance, to be held in the Hamptons next week, just got a nice calendar notice in The New Yorker.

Setting up the Raleigh appearance is the very bold project of my office partner Carrie Knowles, whose 26 year-old son Neil Leiter plays with the group. She single-handedly turned the news that the group was coming to New York into the creation of an annual international classical music festival for Raleigh. A successful visual artist, gallery owner, and author, she says its the largest project she has undertaken, and that is saying a lot.

If you want to buy tickets ($15), call 919 757-9279. The performance is Saturday, July 5, at Raleigh's AJ Fletcher Auditorium. The musicians, eleven young talents from six countries, will come out front and meet the audience at the close of the program.




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