I’d
like to write more than I do. I really
would. When I read my favourite blogs I
always feel so inspired to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and
compose some elegant treatise on the summer joys of peppery arugula or what I
love about being Anglican, or even a narrative about something funny that
happened recently. But then, inevitably,
the surge of creativity welling almost to the point of action retreats back
down the shore to the sea, the inner sea, where it rests in a mildly undulating
passivity.
I
tell you now, dear readers, the sea of the inner self is vast, it is powerful,
and it is virtually dormant. What a
crime! What neglect of the soul!
The
problem with me, as is so often the case with almost everything except cleaning
and cooking, is that all the interesting and creative things I want to do take
practice, and more importantly, trial and error. I don’t like error. I become angry and frustrated if I can’t
master something immediately, the first time I try it, and then my anger veers
off into boredom and I drop the whole project. I have probably hundreds of books purchased in
a mad rush of infatuation with their titles and content that sit unread on our
(burgeoning and overstuffed) bookshelves. I have a very long scarf that I’ve been
knitting for almost a year from pink eyelash yarn, which stares reproachfully
at me from the knitting basket on the floor. I have $75 worth of recently purchased “art”
supplies – coloured card stock, shape punchers, gold ink, stamps, thin asian
paper squares – languishing in piles on the desk in our home office. I have a very expensive mat cutter (bought in
the wild-eyed hope of matting and framing all my unframed prints myself)
cluttering up the walk-in closet cheek-by-jowl with Bartender Dude’s tools.
And
I read these blogs, like Orangette, and Not Martha, and HelloMyNameIsHeather,
and Nothing But Bonfires, and I feel so envious of their ability to lead
creative lives, to get up early in the morning and being doing, baking,
whipping up pincushions, and writing such beautiful prose. I’m sure THEY don’t come home from work and
eat nachos on the couch watching three hours of crap television while the house
gets dustier and dustier and the unfinished scarf stays unfinished. No I’m sure their lives are ordered and their
houses are clean and they have piles of time and energy to always be doing
something or making something or writing something.
And
I have to remember that these lucky women do not work 9 hours a day doing
Things They Don’t Care About and none of them (with the exception of Orangette)
are planning a wedding, and they are probably disciplined about getting enough
sleep. And I am sure if they read this
post each one of them would laugh hysterically and debunk every lovely myth I’ve
spun in my head about them – that their houses ARE dirty and that they have
LOADS of unfinished projects lying around – but the point is, I think I need to
change a few things about the way I currently conduct my life.
STARTING with Getting Enough Sleep. I’ve
tried the writing every day thing – well, see, again, I haven’t so much TRIED
it as done it once and abandoned it when the words wouldn’t come – but I don’t
want to set myself up for failure by being too ambitious (another terrible
habit of mine, scuppering my boat before I’ve even shoved off). So we’ll see what I can do.
I
am going to attempt to change little by little, and report back here on how it all
goes.
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