Holding onto our lives

We hold onto our lives as hard as we can. Isn't it strange how we say we seek adventure, travel, and new experiences, but will do everything we can to preserve the status quo? Weird creatures we are, as Yoda would put it.

Sometimes our world gets shaken. Sometimes we are forced to confront the unknown. I'd like to think I'd face such a change with my eyes wide open, my body straining against the new wind. But too many times, I've tried to retreat. Tried to preserve what couldn't be preserved. Done it too many times with too many relationships and life situations. I know me too well.

When I was younger and quicker and harsher with my judgments, I used to think it was cowardly to not embrace change. But now that I'm older with too many sins of my own to presume to judge the sins of others and now that I've seen so many changes that definitely weren't for the better, I know that both ways take unflinching courage, dogged stubbornness, and unflagging hope.

Just so you know

Just because I don't argue with you doesn't mean I agree with you. Because I don't fill my timeline with hate, ignorance, and prejudice disguised as political memes or stances, I have found that some people mistakenly think I agree with their particular poison. But I don't.

 
Oh, you have the right to say whatever you want, but I also have the right to research what you say and then discard the parts not based on healthy thought. And if you ask me, I will tell what science, what faith, what the Bible, what compassion, what wisdom says.

 
If you can produce evidence not based on repeating what the hollow news shows say, what Twitter says, what biased internet sites say, what you "just feel in your gut" to be true, then I will adjust my worldview accordingly. But getting louder, getting meaner, getting hateful, just makes my position stronger and harder.

 
Just so you know.

 
And if you think this applies to you, then it does. And I am not sorry. If your friendships and your loves are based on people parroting what you think--and all of us are wrong in some things--then you are a tiny person. You should try to grow. Or not. If you decided to settle down in your journey, at least try to find a place where your mind can roam freely and see the horizon and maybe a bit of what is over it.

Made for More

It always comes down to this: Every second we live is a second closer to death. Most of us prefer to not think about it since it doesn’t seem healthy to dwell on our approaching demise. A few rare (thankfully) individuals focus on death, sometimes to the extreme of choosing to commit murder or suicide or both. But most of us live our lives in the now. No one knows when they’re going to die, which allows us to make some terrible choices since we think we’re going to survive the consequences of our foolishness. Youth makes us immortal, we think.

All religions focus on death, or really the afterlife. It seems inconceivable to us that we won’t survive in some fashion, be it Heaven, Nirvana, or merging with the Cosmic Flow. To think of the earth as a staging area or a practice arena for what comes next helps many of us to find meaning in our lives. Other people choose to hedonistically live for pleasure now. “You only get one life; live it to the fullest.” A slogan that seems to be particularly popular for selling beer and sports cars.

Time overwhelms us. If you think about all those nameless people who went before us and all those who will follow us, you can feel lost in the multitudes. Few of us will achieve the fame to be remembered 100 years from now--not that such remembrance could factor into our lives now because we won’t know if we will be remembered or what we will be remembered for. The vast majority of us will not be remembered here.

You have to shy away from such knowledge, you know. You can’t live your life with eternity peering over your shoulder. The responsibility of living for the future can drain your joy now. There is a balance we should seek between now and eternity, between pleasure and responsibility, and between us and other people. “Moderation in all things,” to quote a very wise man.

Balance. There’s the rub. How to gain it. How to keep it. How to be an adult in a world that celebrates bad behavior. We’re not a society that appreciates good behavior. Bad behavior will get you on a so-called reality show. Bad behavior will get your name in the tabloids. People will know you if you have more money than sense, cheat on your lover, steal money from friends, cuss to shame a sailor, and perform other egregious actions. If you kill yourself later on, well, that’s sad, but you might even get songs written about you and at least one made-for-TV movie on one of the thousands of cable channels.

But we’re made for so much more. We can be a light to our friends. We can be kind to our enemies. We can leave the world a better place than we found it. We can be adult and reasonable and sane and right. Not because there will be a reward for it--because there won’t be--but because it’s the right thing to do. When we humans finally do the right thing because it’s right and not because we’re rewarded for such, then we will have finally at long last grown up.

I hope it’s soon. Don't you?

When the words won't come

So here I am, staring into a blank screen while my muse stares back. He’s in a bad mood. Been in a bad mood for a while now—thirty years or so. Some of my writing friends might be surprised to hear that I have a muse because I don’t talk about him much. I don’t say, “My muse is lazy today.” Or “my muse is not moving me.” I have always said that I can’t have writer’s block because the electric company doesn’t have billing block.

But...and it’s a big but; I cannot lie...sometimes I have nothing to write. Okay, that’s not true. What I have are scraps. Sentences without context. Funny dialogue with no mouths to speak it. Fragments of poems flittering across the room. When this happens, I have an image of a muse—a sullen, cigar-smoking, carb-gobbling, butt-scratching muse—who would favor me with a smirk except he’s too busy watching horse racing on Channel 1007 because he has a Benjamin riding on Blue Whirlaway in the Fifth.

It’s annoying, but I do have ways around him. Maybe you also have a reluctant, annoying, smirking muse. Maybe some of the things I do might help you. In no particular order, they are:

1. Chores. I have discovered one of the quickest ways to jolt my muse into action is housework. It has to be a mindless chore, though. Vacuuming works. Dusting. My body can do the chore with muscle memory while my mind is free to wander places.

2. Music. Fast instrumentals for the most part. No slow, beautiful pieces unless I want to sit down. And nap. I try to make the music match what I’m writing. Upbeat for humor, flowing for nonfiction, mysterious for mysteries, of course. Right now, I’m listening to Bach. I want a nap.

3. Taking a walk. Being away from the computer can often energize me, particularly since I detest walking almost as much as I detest turnips. Walking is good for my health and I have a step goal, but really, I’d rather be carried everywhere by a robot litter.

4. Indulging in fictional slaughter. I kill everyone in my work-in-progress. Raging dinosaurs falling through a rift of time, monstrous comets littering the atmosphere with hungry microorganisms, murderous volcanoes with a grudge against humanity—we know what we did. Or the gentle, sweet grandmother in my story will load her famous Christmas cookies with strychnine to let her family know how she really feels about being stuck in assisted living. Something about the slaughter wakes the characters up as they realize I’m nuts and they had better perform if they want to make it to the last page.

5. Reading craft books. I keep several near my desk so I can grab them when I need to. If I’m not going to write, by Shakespeare’s blue bonnie, I’m going to learn about writing. I also use them to research a particular problem I’m having. Someone else has had the same problem and solved it.

6. Drinking caffeine. Coffee. Tea. And Diet Dr Pepper. Don’t want to be dependent on anything, thank you very much, but sometimes a nice kick in the brain is needed.

7. Changing projects. I typically have two or three projects going on, a couple of nonfiction—have to pay the bills—and a fiction one. A poem or two. I find I can write myself into a hole on one, change to another and write that one into a dark alley, and surprise, surprise, my subconscious has found a rope to throw down to the first one.

8. Talking to fellow writers about writing. Not their lives, which are absolutely engrossing, mind you, but writing. How to handle dialogue tags. The cliché that haunts their work. Which-hunting and well-seekers. Best paragraph they’ve read lately or written. Book that showed them how to solve a plot problem. Struggles they’re having in their writing. How they roped and branded their muse, yee-haw! 

9. Imagining the book is done and I’m being interviewed about the book or article on PBS. Really, this one works for me. I can’t explain it.

10. Acting out the dialogue and the action as much as I can. I stand with my pages and pace around my room. I shout, I plead, I cry, I laugh. Treating my work as a play (movie!) seems to catch the muse’s attention if only because he’s never seen anyone behave that way before.

And sometimes, I write about writing and my struggles to get a few words on the unforgiving screen. Like now. I have three projects waiting, and while two remain stalled, I see a way forward on the third one. So I must go but want to know: What do you do when the words won’t come?

Mother's Day

I warn you. This is a harsh post for Mother's Day. Feel free to skip it.

Even though this is Mother's Day, I've been reminded during a phone call with a friend that some mothers are bad to their children. I was blessed with my mother who made her children a priority in her life. My prayers and thoughts are with those children who are not and were not as fortunate as I was. If you're a mother who loves her children more than herself, then may God bless you and reward you richly. He is proud of you. If you're not, then I promise you that there will be a harvest of sadness and sorrow that you will reap. If you mistreat your children when they are young, you will not be their friend or even loved when they are adults. Why would you expect them to act otherwise? 

Everyone seems familiar with "honor thy father and mother," but are you as familiar with Ephesians 6:4? It starts: "And, ye fathers." This is directly addressed to parents and then gives two duties that parents must do for their children. 

First duty: "Provoke not your children to wrath." Passionate and unreasonable rebukes, intemperate language, broken promises, neglect, or cruel usage will cause resentment on the part of your children. The Bible doesn't say that you can justify such behaviors. In fact, it's quite plain: You have a duty as a parent to "provoke not your children to wrath." No ifs, ands, or buts about it. If you mistreat your child, God will not bless you. This doesn't mean there shouldn't be correction, but that you are to remember that your children are precious and to cherish them.

Second duty: "But bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." The Revised Version reads: "Nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord." Training and restraining as well as admonition are implied. I see many parents who don't bring their children up in church and don't provide any other moral instruction, and then they are seemingly amazed when their children take drugs or steal. Yes, children have free agency, but they will do as you have trained them to do. If you cuss, cheat on your taxes, lie, behave badly, take drugs, or drink to excess, then your children will do as you do and not as you say.

It seems that some parents base their love on conditions. I love you if "you make good grades," "you clean your room," "you excel in sports," and so on. Some parents try to make children into their slaves or their clones. Those parents are breaking their children's hearts. And they are committing sin. They should remember God's example: although He expects and requires certain behaviors from us, He always loves us. There are no limits on His forgiveness.

I've been talking with a friend whose parents were alcoholics and drug users when he was young. There were many times when he and his brother didn't know if they would get breakfast or supper, but thank God for a federal program that saw to it that they would get lunch. Now his mother—who doesn't drink or take drugs anymore but still has a terrible temper—thinks he should allow her to live with them. But he won't do it. He remembers those early days, and he doesn't want her around his children. He's seeing to it that she's being taken care of properly, but his first duty is to his children. She sowed a crop of neglect and cruelty—she never spoke to him without a scream when he was young—and now she is reaping the harvest.

This is a harsh post for Mother's Day, but my loving mother never minced words. She called out evil when she saw it, and I think she would like this post. Children are precious and they grow up. Cherish them while you can. Love them while you can. Because if you wait, it will turn out to be too late.

10,000 hour rule?

A few days back I talked about the “10,000 Hour Rule.” It says that to be an expert in anything, you have to put 10,000 hours into it. For those math-minded among you, that works out to 20 hours a week for 50 weeks for 10 years. Yikes. I started wondering about that so-called rule and what science was actually behind it.

The rule was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success. He based this ubiquitous rule of thumb on a 1993 study conducted by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. That study looked at students at a music academy in Berlin and found that the most accomplished students had put in approximately 10,000 hours practicing by the time they were 20 years old. Gladwell took that idea further by estimating the Beatles had put in 10,000 hours of practice before hitting it big and that Bill Gates did 10,000 hours of programming before he founded Microsoft. Gladwell’s point was that you could do 10,000 hours of practice and become an expert in a given field.

Well, not exactly. Gladwell’s point was that people who wanted to excel needed to practice a lot, but the 10,000 Hour Rule was catchy and easy to understand. And he referred to it often in his book. Other authors picked up the hour rule and applied it to all sorts of activities.

However, Anders Ericsson, one of the authors of the study in an interview with the website Six Seconds, says that Gladwell misinterpreted the study and that the 10,000 hours was an estimate at best. Some music students achieved mastery with fewer hours while others needed more. In fact, nearly half of the higher achieving students had not put in 10,000 hours.

The other thing that Ericsson says Gladwell didn’t pay attention to was that the students who received direction from a talented teacher did better and achieved mastery faster than those who did not.

My curiosity was itching so I looked up the study, which carries the exciting title of “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.” I could see why Gladwell thought what he did about the study when I saw this statement from the abstract: “Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.” However, the study did make a point that “deliberate practice” was required to optimize improvement.

In the Six Seconds interview, Ericsson said, “This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to improved ability. You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.” In other words, practice by itself won't lead to improvement. If you practice a poor habit, you'll only get better at being bad. You need to work at mastering your craft with each word you write.

Ericsson says natural talent, environmental factors, and good teaching also play a huge role in determining success in a field. While the first one is not under a person’s control, the other two can be. Seek out environments conducive to your purpose, and seek out teachers who can direct you.

For writers, this means we need to learn from experienced successful writers. We have many to choose from. For instance, best-selling author Holly Lisle runs an online writing school as does Writer’s Digest. We can also attend writing conferences and retreats. Oklahoma’s own best-selling author William Bernhardt has several writing events each year, and he has a whole series of writing craft books that are short and pithy and should be in your library. Staci Mauney has a series of videos on YouTube covering various aspects of writing. We can seek out expert writing instructors and books with little effort. Perhaps you have writing instructors and books you can recommend in the comments. I would love to see them.

And, of course, we need to write, write, write, all with the purpose of improving our skills with words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. It might not take us 10,000 hours, but it will take effort and commitment. Fortunately, we’re overflowing with both of those, aren’t we? Yes, we are.