An author's wrestling match with productivity and possibility
I blame this post on a writer buddy who Voldemort-like Shall-Not-Be-Named but she asked me to report back this week on what I will stop doing at this midyear point.
Stop.
As in scale back, prioritize, focus on the important stuff.
I mean it’s midyear so maybe I have meandered for six months (somewhat), not gotten to drafting Book 2 (true) and haven’t achieved quite all my overzealous (OK unrealistic) to-do’s, but stop doing stuff?
I’m a busy girl. That’s who I am. A doer.
I work in simultaneous possibilities — market my current book, sell the anthology with my short story, write Book 2. Plus have a life with my husband, traveling, keeping up the house, grandkids, bookclubs, watching Netflix. . .
Does this sound familiar?
Voldemort’s notion to stop doing has me in a bit of a tailspin until Mom rode up on her white charger and laughed.
When my mom died
When my mom died in her one-bedroom apartment and my brother and sister-in-law and hospice nurses had left, and the dark-suited funeral home people had come to carefully carry away my mom’s blanket-covered body it was mid-afternoon.
July 31, 2021. Typical southern Illinois sticky hot day.
I didn’t want to go out to the car yet, drive home to relay the previous hours to my patient husband. Not yet. So, I sat on the floor in the silence of her small living room, leaned back against the pumpkin-color couch I’d sat side by side so many times with Mom, and let the tears fall.
It just felt right to linger. Like there was something unfinished I had to do.
In this low line of sight, my teary eyes came to rest on two stacked decorative boxes Mom had set alongside a low soft chair across from me. Decorated with periwinkle-blue pretty floral and garden illustrations, they had recently appeared as a cheerfully clever side table. She’d never opened them in front of me. Curious, I scooted over to take a look.
Inside — carefully wrapped in thin plastic sandwich bags —was a single row of letters. Maybe eighty, ninety? Yellowed by age.
Sliding them out of their envelopes, carefully labeled by Mom in her neat teacher handwriting, I discovered correspondence between my parents from 1951 - 53. Dad was age 21-23 at that time; Mom was a year younger. As I opened the envelopes one by one, I followed my parents through flirty first dates to gradual vulnerability to earnest declarations of love. The notes ended just a few giddy weeks before their wedding.
Of course I read with tears in my eyes.
Silly greeting cards. Mom’s delighted description of ducks in her yard. A nickname Dad gave Mom I’d never heard, “Curly” An atrocious bathing suit gift from an aunt. Fascination with flying saucers. A checkers challenge! Mom’s practice teaching at a local school. Dad’s tired scrawl past midnight after a late-night study session.
Then also sprinkled throughout: “We just can’t be grateful enough.” “I realize the responsibility and opportunity we have for happiness before us.” “I don’t think I’ve really lived yet.” until my favorite,” Let’s really try to make our life together a union of light.”
Sitting on that floor, reading the carefully preserved pages, I felt strangely suspended in time. For I knew what those two young people falling in love did not. What lay ahead. Something of the life they would go on to live. Four children, moves across the country, settling into southern Illinois, building a solar-paneled home, planting explosively thriving flowerbeds, adopting stray animals as devoted pets.
And as teachers they would leave gentle fingerprints on countless young lives —5-year-olds in my mom’s kindergarten classes, 20-year-olds in my dad’s college econ courses.
But in these pages, they don’t know this yet. They are earnest, urgent, filled with expectancy on a tidal wave of love.
My body hummed. Like I could feel a resonance. Their possibility.
Cosmic calendar ends in a blip
Recently I heard about the cosmic calendar. Astronomer Carl Sagan created the concept in 1977 in his book, The Dragons of Eden. Later, I believe he discussed it on his 1980 tv show, Cosmos, but I never saw it.
The Cosmic Calendar compresses the 13.8-billion-year history of the Universe into one Earth year. At this scale, there are 437.5 years per cosmic second, 1.575 million years per cosmic hour, and 37.8 million years per cosmic day.
Snap your fingers! There went about four hundred forty years!
Follow me with this: The calendar begins with the Big Bang taking place on the first second of January 1. The timeline captures major events: the Milky Way galaxy (August 5) and solar system formation (September 1); photosynthesis (October 1) and multi-cellular organisms (December 5); dinosaurs appearing (December 25) and going extinct (December 30), until finally, naturally late to the party, on December 31 at 11:53 pm we homo sapiens arrive seconds before midnight.
I stared at that damn calendar. That’s how teeny-tiny-itsy-bitsy insignificant I am?
Who am I on the cosmic calendar? A nano second? I was an English major. I can’t do that math, but this calendar is leaving a super disturbing impression of insignificance. Like it really doesn’t matter what I’m doing/not doing, or who I’m with, or even who I love.
No resonance buzz here
Impossible to see possibility.
I have a stake
So, my parents’ unpretentious lives are before me in one corner, Carl Sagan’s demo of insignificance squats opposite. It feels like a wrestling match. What does my drive to be productive matter when I’m a blink in time to the universe?
On the other hand, achieving everything on my to-do list also pales next to unforeseen sadness laying ahead for my tenderly young parents. Like the fearful months a son flew a fighter jet in Desert Storm. Mothers who died of dementia. And ultimately their own passing from cancer. My dad first, then fifteen years later, my mom.
And then it hit me.
I have a stake in this world. A stake in my family. A stake in the book I wrote about a woman and the artist she championed to be acknowledged and celebrated. A stake in my community. My country.
A stake in challenging and learning and reaching back to give a hand up because so many stand and walk before me clearing the path ahead.
Personal significance? The idea feels flimsy next to these earnest, heartfelt feelings.
“Do what you can with what you have, where you are.” said Teddy Roosevelt, the president who created our national parks system to preserve their pristine beauty for future generations he would never see.
Do the work that’s before me, in whatever way it comes to me to perform, using the talents Grace has given me.
Perhaps possibility then is holding space. Suspending judgement and attachment to specific outcomes. Showing up. It reminds me of the story of the actor Jim Carreywhen he was a struggling actor.
At 19, Carrey headed to Hollywood - but like many young actors trying to make it in Tinseltown, he found that success was elusive. In 1985, a broke and depressed Carrey drove his old beat-up Toyota up the Hollywood hills. There, sitting overlooking Los Angeles, he daydreamed of success. To make himself feel better, Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million for "acting services rendered," post-dated it 10 years and kept it in his wallet.
The check eventually crumbled, but it deteriorated as he worked and succeeded and failed and got up to work some more, until ultimately earning that $10 million and more.
So, for me, "holding space" is emerging as an alternative to the pressure of achieving specific outcomes. Instead, how about embracing the unknown and being open to new opportunities and then getting down to work.
Ah, Voldemort. I will take a few things off my list.
I’m here a very short time.
And I have possibilities to explore.
Appreciating you,
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