Another successful year? Depends on how you track it

I’m writing from the end of a marginally disappointing year and the start of a new one filled with promise. 

The fact is, all years are filled with promise at the start, and many disappoint at the end, or else feel kind of neutral. Very seldom do we look back with satisfaction at how much butt we kicked in the previous twelve months. Even when we kick butt, those butts left unkicked come more readily to view in all of their roseate kickability.

A lot of my writer friends are in the habit of reporting year-end stats: how many submissions they made, what percentage of submitted works were accepted, that kind of thing. I am a huge fan of goal setting and tracking, so I am all for this, even if I can’t participate very easily this year—my records are in chaos and I didn’t submit a whole lot anyway. I did publish my favorite flash fiction piece I’ve written, and an interview with it to boot, and that was very satisfying. But publishing activity is quite time consuming, and lack of time was the major theme of my 2017. I have to work very hard as an adjunct instructor to cobble together a living, and my spare time is mostly accounted for elsewhere.

When I see my friends posting outstanding stats, I feel excited for their progress. Good things are built from publishing individual works—book contracts, opportunities to read, careers, advancement. A lot of people I know work extremely hard on making their magic happen, and I am fully here for that.

Unfortunately, other friends report some despondency when they look back at the year just passed. Some submitted a lot but had poor results. Many, like me, didn’t submit much, and a few of these feel the weight of missed opportunities.

I do wonder if there’s not more value to tracking other factors than our submission flow-through. What if we were to quantify the words we wrote, for instance? (I do most of my poetry drafting longhand, often on handy scraps that I employ and promptly lose, so this is darn near unquantifiable for me, but the idea of counting words feels like a move in a good direction.)

What if, too, we were to count the finished works we created, whether good or bad—a count of the stuff that’s done? Then the end of the year would be spent not in a flurry of final submissions, but in nailing that final couplet on a sonnet or finally solving the problem of how to conclude that essay without resorting to bookending. I think I’d feel very satisfied closing out some drafts as I closed out the year.

And wouldn’t it be lovely if we had the discernment and self-love to assess the beauty we made in a given year? Or the truth we told? Or, embracing the Keatsean understanding, both?

I’ve had many poems that were non-starters that nevertheless had wisdom in them—an image or a line or a phrase that was just right, and that sang straight to the moon. But maybe the poem was a goner, and the snippet wouldn’t fit in another poem or story or essay. Maybe I gave up and posted it on social media. It was still true, right? Still beautiful? Where’s our count of that?

It’s my belief that for writers, a measure is more apt than a count. Rather than tapping each accomplishment on its head to account for it, it’s OK to look back on a year (or a life) and to see that there’s a lot there—the spirit had substance, and it’s impossible to throw our arms wide enough to take it all in.

When we’re writing, we’re allowing our very best selves a chance to be present. In my own private way of construing it, we’re tapping in to a higher intelligence that is allowed to express through us, and every moment spent at the page or in our imaginings is time that we allow wisdom and compassion to flow through us. Even if we have a different notion of the source of intelligence, wherever it comes from, we ought to give it opportunity to express, and that’s the very special thing that writers do.

Think of all the lesser things that took up our time in 2017—television reruns, “presidential” tweets, shaving, bagging leaves, sorting mail. So much of life happens without lyricism. If we made any room at all for beauty last year, we should give ourselves credit for contributing to the net good, and perhaps resolve to do it again in 2018.

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On planning to be happy

I’ve been thinking a lot about reaching my writing goals, and my last three posts discussed the basics of establishing a mission, setting goals, and managing time.

But there is so much more to life than writing, and I need to remind myself of this on occasion. I’m sitting by one beautiful example of this so-much-more as I write this; while I do my work, he does his—he’s watching an episode of Peppa Pig and eating his cereal.

My shorthand way of thinking about the so-much-more is to call it happiness. That’s a very wiggly word for it, though. Is happiness the same as joy, or am I low-balling when I revel in the simple pleasure of having my best little friend by my side? Is this contented feeling happiness? 

And as I write this, and always, at every moment, there is gut-wrenching torture and pain and sorrow in the world. Someone I love is consumed by worry that he can’t pay an important bill. Another person I know is doubled over in pain at the death of her sister. And people I’ll never meet are starving and suffering and hurting in ways I can’t even imagine. This is always true, and there’s something problematic about happiness or joy under the circumstances.

I teach composition at the university level, and in recent classes I’ve been pursuing a happiness theme as a research focus. My students and I try to pin down a definition of happiness. We talk about the relationship of happiness to work, to love, to place, to the spirit, to art—any connection we can make to untangle the idea (or to further complicate it). We ponder what our nation’s founders meant when they said we had the right to pursue it; we probe why polls find significant unhappiness in the U.S., despite our wealth and apparent opportunity.

I’m embarking on a new class, and I just posted some journaling themes for my students. These were pretty easy to generate, because they’re the very same questions I’ve been ruminating over. Here are some:

1. To what extent is happiness a choice?

2. What did our nation’s founders mean when they said we had the “right to pursue happiness”?

3. Is joy just extreme happiness, or is it distinct from it?

4. In what ways is sorrow relevant to/necessary for happiness?

5. How can we best address sadness in another?

6. Why do some polls find U.S. citizens unhappy?

7. What is the main ingredient of your own happiness?

8. How do you deal with sadness?

9. Why do we sometimes laugh in inappropriate settings, like funerals?

10. How can you increase your happiness?

11. Should you try to be happier?

12. Do you ever sort of revel in a mood of melancholy, and if so, why?

13. Does activism require anger?

14. What’s up with people telling us to smile?

15. What is the role of religion in happiness?

16. What is the role of work in happiness?

17. What is the role of family in happiness?

18. What is the role of romantic love in happiness?

19. What is the role of home in happiness?

20. What is the role of mindfulness or meditation in happiness?

21. What is the role of pets in happiness?

22. What is the opposite of happiness?

23. Why do some people feel happier in a tidy or clean setting?

24. What good can you say about sadness?

25. What is one thing you can do right now to improve your level of happiness?

26. Read any article about happiness, scholarly or otherwise, and respond to it.

One thing I tell my students, and something I believe very strongly, is that sustained happiness is not an accident. We may feel a burst of pleasure when we win some money on a scratch-off lottery ticket or we run into an old friend, but it seems to me that a happy life is the result of planning. We have to set ourselves up for it. Luck helps, too—if we have good health and a job we enjoy, we’re mostly just fortunate, although health and employment, too, are things we can strive for.

So as I’m planning for a summer of successful writing, I’m also thinking about soaking up all the happiness I possibly can—and about supplementing the happiness of the people I care about (and I like to think that’s everyone, although I may fall short in a few particular instances).

What will happiness require? I have an idea that I’ll need to write things I care about, but also that I must have time in nature, time with my family, time for navel-gazing and relaxation. My gut says that multitasking is working in the wrong direction, and that to be fully happy, I have to inhabit my life and be fully present in each moment.

I anticipate some disappointments, and maybe some very harsh ones. But right now, I’m reaching for joy, and I’m doing all I can to be ready for it.

A Writer's Spirit: The pull of intention

Living with intention: That’s my project these days, and as a writer, this means writing with intention. Furthermore, as a writer who aspires to reach and impact as many readers as I can, I’m working to keep the writing constantly at the fore of the things I care about.

Today is a good example. I have a habit of making things-to-do lists during church, the part of the week where I am most deliberate about embracing hope and possibility. It means I’m not listening closely about half the time, but that’s OK, too—the brain acts like a sieve, and the important parts catch, and that’s when I listen closely.

Today’s list of tasks is quite a long one, and I don’t see anything on it that can wait until tomorrow. I have two grant applications that need to be completed by the morning. Some teaching and grading work is overdue—work that risks inconveniencing students, who are already overloaded. There are freelance editing tasks to finish and jobs to apply for, both sooner rather than later, and on top of all of this, I’d like to love my kids and clean my house—and I wouldn’t mind watching the Oscars.

But the thing I’m attacking first is this blogpost, and there is a reason for that—one that I’ve written about in the past. Writing is my driving force in life, and when I put writing first, everything falls into place.

Until recently, intention has been … well, intentional for me. It has been a project that I have worked hard to accommodate. I’ve had to deliberately order the items on my list and make sure writing was at the top (sometimes with a little arrow to boost it from where it occurred to me to include it). I’ve also had to make a literal space for writing to happen—a desk, a table, a corner of the couch.

Here, in the universe, I’ve arranged both space and time to accommodate my writing, to allow myself to receive inspiration like a visitor. I’ve made doing this a habit, and inspiration does visit daily, exactly like a familiar friend. Whatever else is going on, I chisel a gap and I step into it and writing is there, ready.

While I was noodling in church, a song played, and few words of its lyrics were caught in my sieve. It was a tune that was familiar from my childhood Baptist days—the kind of hymn we almost never sing in my Unity congregation—and it said something about silently calling.

When I was eight and Baptist—a religion that was already a terrible fit, and not just for me, but for my mom, who merely dropped me off at that church and picked me up after—the lyrics were different, and it was called “Open My Eyes That I May See.” I like the tunes of these old hymns, although the “wretch like me” talk is a little galling (I’m no wretch, and you aren’t, either). Likewise, the constant construction of God as male (Father, He, etc.) seems silly. Still, something about these hymns transports me.

Today we were singing the words “Silently now you call to me,” and I forget the rest of the lyrics, but I’m sure they had to do with our private ability to connect with our universal source (a very Unity-like concept). This sounds so much like my experience with writing, though—no matter how busy I am, I experience this “silent call,” although I find that wording a little ridiculous. It’s more like a pull—a source of gravity, a private planet.

The pull gets stronger the more I honor it, and I can get swept up in it. I lose time to it; I fall away from my physical self.

And that’s why I put it first. There is so much to do! And yet I may as well try to avoid the gravity that holds me to the planet as avoid the need to write.

This is the result of intentionality, which is only beginning to pay off. I’m eager to see where it takes me.