Writing

Something weird happens when you sit down to write--not when you have something to say--but just because it's high time you got your act in gear and put words to page. You hope, as you blindly start, that the words will somehow magically flow--that it will take a dam to staunch the torrential flood of genius bursting forward. This is what you hope--yet, as you find yourself carefully constructing phrases and meticulously pouring over word choice, you realize that word fairies don't exist, and Wordsworth lied about Tinturn Abbey.

You complete your first paragraph--painfully you recognize it doesn't really accomplish anything. While there are words, they don't really say anything, and that's cheating. Panacea constitutional torturous enjoin atelier quotidian gesticulate nebbish onus torpor frangible--see? At this point you realize--time for a thesis, there's gotta be a focus. What?--there was that one guy singing with his headphones in about smoking guns and coming home that reminded you of that one time when the neighbor girls sang Kelly Clarkson with her headphones in and you wished she really would fall to pieces. Or how you wanted to use a specific line--"Could you two continue your petty bickering? I find it most intriguing." You could go deep and despondent and write from the place nobody else seems to get, but you remember you've done that a lot recently and it's starting to get a little old (besides making your mom wonder if you're "Ok"). Crap--you're rambling again.

You've tried your hand at being a pocket philosopher. Readers seemed to think that the wisdom of "don't be stupid" went without saying. A commentary on the lazy technique of the informal second-person used here and how its critical theory psychoanalysis ties of repression and distancing may lead to a deeper understanding of the speaker would probably bore internets. No good--you need the perfect subject...DAMN YOU Jim Gaffigan! I was totally going to say all that stuff about bacon...I mean you--lazy second-person technique you--you were going to say it.

Doubt starts to fester. Maybe you're not a writer. Maybe you should just give up...C'mon, who are you fooling anyways? Even Stephanie Meyers got published, and here you sit--a dwarfed, pathetic, husk of a writer--beaten out by sparkly vampires and prepubescent fantasies...not even worthy of touching a keyboard. Stop it! You tell yourself--it's just the bad demon angel that wears red and holds a fork and sits on your shoulder to get in distracting fights with the good angel talking. You're better than that. It'll come--your inspiration will hit, and there will be the ethereal column of light and the angel choirs and everything....

Caravans! That's it--the perfect thesis. Focused. Unusual. Camels are inherently funny/looking. There's the appeal of the exotic east; plus, hardly anybody knows anything about them so it's your word against theirs. Yes! Caravans...let's see, there's sand, and hot, and turbans....and....um, there's sand, and hot....and....uh....crap. That's a really bad idea isn't it? You don't know shit about caravans. Maybe you should take a break. Like...right now.

Title

We like to think that it's not that our lives are any less interesting. But, let's face it, sometimes you're just BLOCKED.

Resolutions

Too often, the new year is simply a renewal of old habits; we forget that resolutions and good intentions are for more than paving roads. The new year does not mark an end or a beginning. Time has no divisions to mark its passage. Life comes in a continuum, and each year is simply another chance to get it right.

We could choose the weight. We could choose the being a little kinder, the personal improvement of reading more, the measured pace of all those activities we started and never finished--the quiet resolve to finally tackle those goals that seem to always land in tomorrow. These are all tempting. But after the magnitude of new classes, new books, new responsibilities, absent friends, and faraway family--we are sometimes dwarfed in the magnitude of survival--just getting through.

Pithy doesn't want to simply pass 2010. We want to master the lessons, do ALL the reading (even though, let's face it, sometimes life reads like a textbook); we want to originate ripples and inspire others to get it--hoping in the process to get it ourselves.

We resolve to:

Read to a child.
Watch a sunrise.
Laugh at ourselves.
Send a real letter.
Put on clothes straight from the drier.
Incorporate absquatulate into our vocabulary.
Learn to let it bend before it breaks.
Acknowledge that God is in control.

There are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope or fear, but messages of how things are. We resolve to use this time to cultivate and create, to nurture our world and give birth to new ideas and ventures--to contribute to flourishing and abundance, seeing life in full bloom, energized and expanding.

There are no new beginnings, only new endings.

Closures

The two days before the year slides to its finish hold a complex brew of sentiments. Last night, I was heady with optimism, as a friend and I raised our glasses in a joint wish to seize our visions for the future. Then, this morning, I was barely ready to let a sentence go. How do you close one door and then so soon open another? How do you wrap things up and then prepare to leap again? The mind exhausts itself with such gymnastics. The cocoon of winter is deceptive, solstice nudging us away from sleep. And so the only thing to do is let the body fall and rise, each breath its own small victory, an unbending promise, the truest kind of faith.

Maya Stein