For the new year, my resolution is simple:
Quit. Quit a lot of things that don’t matter.
I’m dropping more and more. I’m cleaning out the house. I’m letting go of obligations. I’m saying no. I’m not taking on any new writing jobs. The money is always great to have, but I’m out of time. Which is more important?
Time.
The word for me in 2011 is to simplify, cut back, cut down, cut out, reduce reduce reduce. No adding until I am working, moving, progressing daily toward the (deepest) goals I have as a wife, mom, writer, worshiper. More room for the real, the deep, the creative. More cutting out of the superfluous, the busy work, the obligations.
I always think the key is Discipline, and that’s part of it I know. But there are other elements too, elements that drive discipline forward.
Things like Desire. Dreams. Doing.
Be a DOER. Less talking, excusing, imagining, procrastinating, fearing, wishing, distracting myself. More do. Sit and write. Stand and work. Be a doer.
Those words – how I need those words. How I need a row of sketchbooks and a jar of the best pens. How I am rapidly rabidly rambunctiously going to declutter this house and my life. How I am realizing that I am not naturally good at things I thought I could easily conquer. That’s okay; it’s kind of a relief to know I have to work at it. Like, hey, that would explain why I have to work at this so much…
So much dead weight.
So much stuff – tangible and intangible – that I carry around each day. It weighs me down, slows me down, drags me down and makes even the things I love to do difficult, slow, painful, irritating, hurtful, unpleasant, unlovely.
Enough of that mess. (Say that emphatically.)
But all that dead weight – that’s why I become so deeply confused, so uncertain about who I am, what I love, where I’m going, why I’m breathing, what my purpose is in this life. Sometimes it’s just a big painful unpleasant business, trudging through life.
That’s what life becomes with so much dead weight: a trudge, a crawl in stinking, hostile, dry rocky thorny places, another fall into the ditch and…
I lay there.
I stay there, wondering why I’m trying to gather up the strength to crawl back out again. Easier to just lay there. Less painful to still myself in the muddy water, accept this place, surrender. Give up. Sleep in and crawl wearily out of bed at the last minute. Quit training, disciplining, trying – just threaten, repeat, ignore, complain. Don’t write. Get mad, blame people, and feel victimized by circumstances. Live in the ditch.
My ditch may be better, nicer, cleaner than someone else’s – no drugs or abuse or adultery here – but it’s still a ditch.
I am meant to live on the mountain.
But the way is, well, up a mountain. My hands and feet and knees ache, bleed on the climb. I forget: why am I climbing? Where am I going? What am I doing here?
The dead weight I carry is too much. I’ve no energy lefty for the climb, no strength to hold on, no mind or time for the vision, to way to renew it, see it, grab onto it, and remind myself why, where, what.
This is the point of life: don’t stay in the ditch.
Photos by Atli Haroarson.