Unforgiving and overdisciplined

Neera

How unforgiving and over-disciplined we have become?

We not only can’t forgive others but also ourselves.

We are harsher on ourselves than we are on others. We judge and punish ourselves if we think that we have not done what we expected to do. We deprive ourselves of the kindness we preach ourselves to offer to others.

We berate ourselves over not being able to write well, write regularly, build an audience, summon our muse, or be good enough when all the time learning, getting better, and not giving up.

We are killing ourselves with the discipline we impose on ourselves. What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, when to sleep, how much to sleep, how much exercise to do, how many words to write in a day, what goals to set, and how challenging they should be.

All these aspirations are not making us any more creative. They are, in fact, killing our creativity.

With all the advances in the twenty-first century, we have not freed the human spirit. Instead, we have imprisoned it to fulfill our wants. And wants never end. They keep on becoming bigger and bigger.

How about waking up from this delusion and liberating ourselves? Be kind to ourselves. Let go of the pressure of performance, productivity, and achievement, and let the mind wander freely into the realm of true creativity.

Coastal beauty

Neera

Last weekend, I was on the southern coast of Australia. The stretch of the coast between New South Wales and Victoria is called the Sapphire Coast, where the color of the ocean is deeper than the sapphire, and the sky is just a shade lighter.

At the heart of the Sapphire Coast is the sleepy town of Merimbula, which has a long point for whale watching and a short point for surfing.

The vast stretch of wilderness, national parks, and ocean teeming with life attracts lots of artisans and is home to lots of galleries, public art, and boutiques.

In the above shot, I was trying to capture a flying helicopter when a seagull flew across. It came right in the center of the frame.

Below is a sculpture by the beach.

Have a linear goal…

Neera

I was going through one of my old journals when I found one of my favorite quotes:

“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere.

But the work of building a path was a living sum so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.

A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there’s nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.

The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him–man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (Emphasis and line-breaks are mine.)

We all need linear goals in our lives to rise above the monotony of circular lives. That is the only way we have to show something at the end of the day.

Twenty years ago, I chose to write as my linear goal. It has not only kept me sane through the madness of the daily grind but also has given me a purpose in life.

Initially, I had little goals such as writing childhood memories, remembering those sounds, smells, and scenes from the past, and learning to describe them. Soon I started attending courses. The first one was a Life Story Writing course. An offshoot of that was a writing group that still has been meeting in my home for the past fifteen years.

I joined another writing group and practiced reading my writing to others.

Encouraged, in 2014, I joined a novel-writing course A Year of Novel at ACT Writer’s Centre. Five of the writers from there continued to meet after the course to continue working on our novels. We are still meeting and critiquing each other’s work.

In between, I won NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) twice, wrote several short stories, and started two blogs.

With writing as my linear goal, I am achieving little milestones just like Ayn Rand said in the below quote:

“[A] man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”

Share something every day

Neera

Two months into the blog and I am feeling the need to post every day. Not because I have lots to say, but because the opposite is true.

Coming up with something to share is a constant struggle for bloggers. Something I need to tackle head-on.

Today Austin Kleon came up with the post. Put it on the refrigerator. He is referring to a quote from a 2002 Jeff Tweedy interview. The full quote is here:

“To say I’ve never been inhibited by expectations would be a lie. It’s more daunting to contend with yourself. It’s like saying I don’t even need to write songs because the greatest songwriter in the world has already done this–Bob Dylan. But he’s dealing with himself, too. The internal stuff is the stuff that kills you. I want to write the greatest song in the world sometimes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wanting to do that, but I think you’re better off when you realize you have no control over it. You just gotta keep making s–t up, scribbling–like sitting down and drawing with my kids. It reminds me to do that in my songs. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad.”   

It is every artist’s responsibility to keep making the s–t up. And to do that every day. That is the only way to get better. That is the only way to find some nuggets in your work.

An artist’s other responsibility is to put their work out there. Worrying for your best work, and waiting till you get better won’t make you better. Putting your work out there, however amateurish, most certainly will.

I am setting this challenge for myself now, to start daily blogging, fully aware of the fact that there will be days when I cannot post anything, particularly when I will be traveling.

But I will tackle those days when I get there. 

Take the pressure off you

Neera

I read the following story in “O’s Little Guide to Finding Your True Purpose” and couldn’t help sharing it.

A friend had an Indian guru who was the embodiment of love, and the guru died. Bereft, my friend, went back to India and stayed with the guru’s principal disciple, and one day the disciple said, “Do you want to see the precious thing the guru left for me?” Then he pulled out something wrapped in an old Indian cloth and ceremoniously uncovered a beaten-up pot. He said, “Do you see?” My friend answered. “No. What are you trying to tell me?” And with a mad glint in his eye, the disciple said, “You don’t have to shine!”

What a great idea! You don’t have to shine.

We have such high expectations of ourselves all the time. Whatever we do, we want to be top-class in it.

We want to write a perfect story in the first draft. We expect our very first blog to be amazing.

We want to dress perfectly, work effortlessly, speak fluently, and so on.

What if we take the pressure off ourselves and just be ourselves?

Mediocre but daring; inept but forgiving; troubled but enduring. 

Permission…

Neera

Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book Big Magic wrote:

A clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies offered me a superb piece of life wisdom. We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks about us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.

They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.

People are mostly just thinking about themselves. They don’t have time to worry about what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, because they are caught up in their own dreams.

Go be whoever you want to be then.

Do whatever you want to do.