The beauty of deadlines

I need deadlines. Self-imposed ones work for me as well as any other kind. Our writers’ group had a deadline to get a piece of writing out on the road to a publication before the end of the year and, well, I did it. Yesterday. If I hadn’t had the deadline of the end of the year, I would have been successful in putting it off until.........

The late writer, Douglas Adams, author of the terrifically hilarious five book trilogy that sorted out that thorny answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, once said that he loved deadlines because he liked the whooshing sound they made as they flew by. It’s not that way for me. I need the finite line drawn across the calender or clock face that says, “you have until this point.” Otherwise, time is, obviously, infinite. I have all the time in the world and it’ll never be enough if I put off my departure from the waiting room. Douglas Adams died when he was forty-nine, two years younger than I am now. If he’d thought time was infinite, we wouldn’t have Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, and I wouldn’t have memories of laughing so hard my sides hurt the next day.

So, once again I say, I did it. It’s the not be-all end-all for which I hope, after all, I’ve resolved to write a book in 2009, but it is a start and not a delay.

Plus, by way of celebration, my husband and I went out for breakfast. We sat by the restaurant's fireplace, enjoying the warmth and wrapping our cold hands around our over-sized coffee mugs, talking of books and movies. Ending one year and getting ready to start a new one buoyed by a sense of accomplishment is a darn good feeling.

Happy New Year’s Eve!

Reflecting and Prognosticating

For me, 2008 has been a very good year. I only “crossed” three things off my to-do list, enjoy the flower garden more, entertain more and bring new writing to my writers’ group, but, in 2008, I’ve finally become less distracted than I used to be. I can more easily cut off the outside world and come into my comfortable cave to write or to contemplate a single idea. I’ve been getting my “work” out of the way more quickly and now have time to read or create. Or nap. I practice focusing and am able to visualize with much less effort.

I’ve gleaned something from this visualization, something it took me half a century to realize. I’m much more likely to do something if it is specific rather than vague. “Exercise more” is less likely to get crossed off the list than “finish a marathon,” though, in my case, finish a marathon is unlikely to make the list in the first place let alone be crossed off. I’ve also realized that a complete list of all the things I hope to do ends up making me feel I’m pulled in a thousand different directions and that I’ve failed because I only accomplished three out of a list of many. So, though I’m not an Uber Frau, I can be a Wonder Woman (I’m still waiting on delivery of that order for an invisible plane and the bullet deflecting gold cuffs). Any who, I’m only listing two goals for 2009.

#1 Travel to a foreign country
#2 Write a book

Two items on which to concentrate my energies in 2009. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Merry Christmas

O' Christmas tree

Be the envy of your peers!

Be your own fairy godmother.


Come on, you know you want to.

And so I say....

Volume

Isn’t it interesting that we call books volumes. Well, it is to me, anyway. A volume of poetry, for instance. Maybe this is because what’s in a book fills more space than the inch or so between the covers. What’s in a book can fill up the world. It most certainly can fill up a life.

Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, contributed to the passage of laws governing the meat packing industry. Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring, led to a ban on DDT. But it’s not only the books with the BIG ideas or themes that have impact, it’s the smaller books that seem to find us at just the right time, speaking to us one on one. If I may be so bold as to admit it, I had the worst education. However, I have always read. A lot. I learned not only how to behave, but how I wanted to behave by reading stories about people with the qualities I hoped I might copy.

I read to find out about other people and places, to realize how something innocuous might appear to someone with a guilty conscious or how big a problem an out-of-date railway timetable is to someone waiting to meet the mother-in-law just in on the train. I used to read biographies and autobiographies because I found interest in a well-lived life before realizing most are so biased they make better fiction. Now I read them for that reason.

I’ve always read mysteries and still do, not because I am comforted by a world in which justice prevails, but because I’ve always like to figure things out. I like to know why on Earth so-and-so decided to do such-and-such (or do-in so and so). I will admit I also liked knowing what went on in English country house parties, too, so Agatha Christie was a favorite until I was about twenty-two.

My reading has become more varied as I’ve aged, I try a bit of this or taste of that, stick my fingers in here or there, dabbling in a bit of something new or coming back to something old. I’ve begun rereading a few favorites, pleased to see an entirely different story running alongside the one I remember. Books are always a discovery for me, even if the discovery is realizing how many ways I can improve.

Here’s to the volume of life and the continuing drive to fill it.

Snow Day

The phrase “snow day” still puts a big smile on my face. A get-out-of-school or get-out-of-work free day. Mother Nature saying you don’t have to do what you thought you had to do. You don’t have to face whatever drudgery would have taken place if you’d had to do the daily routine.

Of course, the phrase is like speaking a foreign language to those souls who don’t keep a snow scraper in their cars year round. I don’t think “Hurricane Day” is anything like the same because people are urged to leave their homes and there is usually lots of advance notice. The beauty of a Snow Day is that you don’t always know before you go to bed at night whether or not you’ll have to hit the road in the morning or not. There’s no warning and you get to stay home.

So, I’ll raise my cup of hot chocolate (homemade with chocolate malt added) and give a toast the one of the most magical of phrases......

.......Snow Day.