creative.mother.thinking

explaining my life to strangers

Archives for November 2006

Why almost finished is not enough

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I just had an epiphany and recognized one of my major stressors: almost finished is not enough. Well, it was my mother’s birthday and I needed a gift. As always I was very early with the thinking and planning, then ordered a book on amazon on time. But then I had an idea: wouldn’t it be a good idea to give her a copy of the song that I sang at my sister’s wedding and that we recorded almost by chance in September? Good idea. Six days before her birthday we even mixed the song and I burned it on CD.

Then it happened (and I fall for this trap every single time): I thought, “Oh, I’m almost done.” and forgot about it. Put a little reminder in my PDA to mail it two days before her birthday. On the mailing day I had to do this:

  1. Burn the CD again, so I didn’t have to give her my only copy.
  2. Design a cover and print it.
  3. Find a jewel case without scratches.
  4. Find an envelope.
  5. Find the drawings my son had made for her.
  6. Find the photo CD that I had meant to give her for months.
  7. Write a few kind words, and maybe find a birthday card. (I solved this by writing directly on the drawings.)
  8. Find a marker and put her address on the envelope.
  9. Find a stamp and find out how much postage it costs.
  10. Go to post office before 5 p.m.

Okay. All of this took 90 minutes! (Never underestimate the time for anything done with computers.) For one measly present. that was “almost finished”. So imagine me doing Christmas presents. And birthday presents for most of my husband’s family who un-conveniently were born around New Year.

I did fell all smug before, because I have done almost all my Christmas shopping. But I’m not so sure anymore. It might be a good idea to look at everything again before Christmas actually comes around. Maybe there are more presents who need a little 90-minute attention.

My husband (who is often wiser than I) says that it takes the same amount of energy to do something from start to “almost finished” as it does to do the last ten percent of it. That would mean my “almost finished” is “only half done”. Argh.

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Why don’t you just do it then?

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One of my dear blog readers (Hello!), who happens to be a close friend of mine, said that she really liked the blog but… (This is how you can tell we’re close. She always has a but too.) But:

“Sometimes I think, ‘If you already know what to do, why don’t you just do it then?'”

My first, and not very mature, reaction to this was: Look, who’s talking. Fortunately I didn’t say it loud. (Until now, that is.) My second thought, the one I did say, was, “If I’d knew the secret to that, I’d bottle it, sell it to everyone who needs it for 50 Cents, and become a millionaire.”

For me the gap between insight and change of behavior is huge. And I know that I’m not the only one. If it were as easy as having an insight and then cheerfully applying it effortlessly, nobody would be fat, or messy, or disorganized. Apart from the people who don’t think. Maybe.

But then I thought again, and she does have a point. All this talking and talking is a form of whining and the high art of procrastination. But, and what you can’t see when you’re only reading my blog, after years and years of just talking I finally entered the stage of behavior change for a lot of areas in my life where I have been wanting to change.

I’m talking about these things so that others can see that they’re not alone. It is easy to think that everybody has his act together except for you. One of the bloggers that I read has put it this way: Stop comparing your insides to the outsides of others. (Sorry, I forgot where I read this. I’ll be happy to give credit when anybody remembers.)

And, in blogging things I’m making myself accountable. And I’m thinking things through. All of that is very helpful. And really, who wants to read a blog that goes all: I’m the best! I do accomplish every single thing on my to-do-list everyday! I never make mistakes! We’d all think that this person could only be a figment of imagination.

So, while I don’t recommend doing without thinking, it’s always good to remember that only doing gets things done. Especially for those of us to whom thinking comes so easy.

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My very own interior decorator

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For a few weeks now my son has been drawing like crazy, there’s paper everywhere. Then he decided that we need signs on all the toilet doors. He did them himself, all alone:


pee man

Note the full bladder and both genders:


pee woman

I love those signs so much we even have one on the toilet that our students use – posted at the right height for a 4.year-old…

Why writing is easy

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or why it is easier for me than writing music.

For a musician I sure have a lot of books on writing. I own exactly 1 book on songwriting. I own (gets up and counts) about half a dozen books on writing.
But when asked I’d never say that I’m a writer. “I’m a musician.”, I’d say, adding in my mind, “But not a good one.”
So I thought about why writing is easy for me. (And yes, you might ask me again after NaNoWriMo). In preparation for next month I’m re-reading “Writing down the Bones”. Natalie Goldberg wrote:

“This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train our mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.”

“We get better because we do it every day”. Yeah, that’s it.

For years I have been writing without realizing it. I started keeping journals at age 9. As a teenager I wrote lots of letters, some bad poems, and I loved writing assignments in school. When we had to write a poem as homework, I wrote two.
Then I wrote my master’s thesis. I wrote in the mornings. Every day I’d sit down at my computer in my pajama – to catch myself unaware before procrastination could set in – and start warming up by writing diary entries on the computer. Though I didn’t like writing the thesis very much, I realized how much I loved writing.

At that time I bought my first book about writing. I still have a file with an idea for a screenplay. (I just wonder if that would make a novel for November. Hm.) And before finishing school I applied to drama studies, where I had to write something. As far as I recall, I wrote down the idea for a play.

But I never did something with this stuff. There are only beginnings in my files. And stories in my head. (I recently thought, if only I had a way of syphoning my thoughts into a computer… There are stories and stories and songs in there. I tell and sing them to myself all the time. High level daydreaming.) When I finished my master’s degree one reason for going for Ph.D. was the chance to go on writing as intense again.

Then, seven years ago (and almost to the day) I read the “Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” by Julia Cameron and started writing morning pages. That’s three pages a day written by hand about anything that crosses your mind. Let’s see, 7 years times 360 days times 3 pages … that’s 7,560 pages that I have written. And I do it every day, whether I feel like it or not.

My computer holds a file with beginnings and ideas. And then I started the blog about six months ago. More writing. (And you know that I’m not in for the one-sentence-post). I’ve never written fiction, though, that will be new in the month to come. But I don’t suffer from lack of imagination, that’s for sure.

So maybe it’s time to call myself a writer too. And to start a practice of writing music like I already have established a practice of writing stories without noticing it.

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