Belated Chapter 10 Check-In
I lost some days this week to overexertion and recuperation. My printer came, and I had to rearrange everything to make room for it. Two days later, my son in law came in with the carpet steamer to clean my room. I moved too many things out of his way and reorganized my creative corner. It's literally clean. It's a lot more comfortable. My room is seriously improved. This took spoons. (Google "The Spoon Theory.")
I did some version of my morning pages every day all the way through, though a couple of the worst days were shortened and only a few hundred words.
I watched the Extended version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy movies and they were stimulating, inspirational, comforting and beautiful. I love being able to see Middle Earth so close to what I imagined when I first read that. The story is very dark, much darker than many modern fantasy novels. I didn't think of it as an artist date, because it isn't something separate from the rest of my life to do something for myself. I'm a bachelor and a writer. Everything I do is the way I want it, everything I enjoy is in some way related to my writing.
This is something about the Artist Date that I'm starting to comprehend. I do things like that every day, not just once a week. I don't have to schedule it into a life that's mostly oriented to other people and what they think of me, or to social obligations. I don't have very many obligations and I let a couple of them go hang this week. I skipped doing Nibblefest Art Contest even though I liked the theme of Reptiles, because I didn't feel up to doing good art on April 20th. I'll do it some other month when I've got time and energy. If it feels more like an obligation than a pleasure, then it's not as important to do it. I do that for fun, and LOTR was more important this week.
Synchronicity... no, not exactly.
Rereading my old morning pages overwhelmed me. One thing became so clear. Any section oriented to the present or the future was generally happy. I was making plans or appreciating little day to day things in my life here and now. There is a great divide between the present and the past as clear as if I were a veteran coming home from a war.
Everything that had to do with anything before I came here was unmitigated horror. The technical term for it is pathos, not tragedy, since the overwhelming majority of the horrors were not things brought on by tragic errors of my own character. In the words of Andy Dufresne from Stephen King's masterpiece Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, I was in the path of the tornado. I made a few mistakes in life but what happened to me as a consequence was so out of proportion to what I did that it makes no sense. Most of it was about things I could not control and did not do, was just born with.
That's true of a lot of people on this planet.
Because so many exercises go into the past and analyze it, rereading my morning pages overwhelmed me with all of it at once. I got depressed. I got PTSD symptoms again. I got flashbacks at inconvenient moments. I got pain-fog stealing days out of my life. I got the shakes. I got the nightmares. I got the unexpected rages and I cried for no immediate reason at things, even sometimes at good things, because they came so late into my life. I got the terrors and wound up dreading how fragile this good life is.
It's not. I don't think it will ever get as bad as it was.
I wrote an essay on a spirituality site that a friend who's engaged in philosophical discussion with me in email created and invited me to. One of the threads was titled "Why are we here?" I snapped.
I articulated my complete response for the first time.
I know why I'm here. I'm here because at every point when I could have chosen to die, I chose to live so that I could become a science fiction writer. That's why I put up with all the rest. The meaning of my life is something I decided to give it. Other than that, I have the same meaning to my life as that cat or a cougar in the hills or a wolf or a kestrel. I'm a living creature that seeks optimal conditions. I chose to migrate rather than fight a lot of times when I faced harsh conditions.
I'm responsible for choosing the meaning of my life and so is anyone else. Even a believer in Divine Will or someone whose religious path leads them to a decision to become a servant of God should recognize that their god would appreciate a willing servant far more than a slave who obeys anything he's told and accepts meaning imposed by others. But then, I can't speak for your god. I can't speak for anyone other than the one person I'm responsible for: me.
It's not fair to their future selves to even speak for the minor children I help take care of on these matters because they will come to face those choices themselves. There's my view of "Why are we here?" You're the only one who can answer that for you, bot you have no right to tell me what my life means. How it impacted yours, yes. But not what it should be. I am a science fiction writer, and I have come a long way on this quest.
I'm at one of the good points now, the things that in stories get a page or two or maybe only a transitional sentence before there's another exciting conflict. Fifty or sixty years of Bilbo's life vanished between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, and those may have been the more enjoyable years Bilbo had. I could stand some more of that while I face my chosen challenges instead of my enemies.
I did some version of my morning pages every day all the way through, though a couple of the worst days were shortened and only a few hundred words.
I watched the Extended version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy movies and they were stimulating, inspirational, comforting and beautiful. I love being able to see Middle Earth so close to what I imagined when I first read that. The story is very dark, much darker than many modern fantasy novels. I didn't think of it as an artist date, because it isn't something separate from the rest of my life to do something for myself. I'm a bachelor and a writer. Everything I do is the way I want it, everything I enjoy is in some way related to my writing.
This is something about the Artist Date that I'm starting to comprehend. I do things like that every day, not just once a week. I don't have to schedule it into a life that's mostly oriented to other people and what they think of me, or to social obligations. I don't have very many obligations and I let a couple of them go hang this week. I skipped doing Nibblefest Art Contest even though I liked the theme of Reptiles, because I didn't feel up to doing good art on April 20th. I'll do it some other month when I've got time and energy. If it feels more like an obligation than a pleasure, then it's not as important to do it. I do that for fun, and LOTR was more important this week.
Synchronicity... no, not exactly.
Rereading my old morning pages overwhelmed me. One thing became so clear. Any section oriented to the present or the future was generally happy. I was making plans or appreciating little day to day things in my life here and now. There is a great divide between the present and the past as clear as if I were a veteran coming home from a war.
Everything that had to do with anything before I came here was unmitigated horror. The technical term for it is pathos, not tragedy, since the overwhelming majority of the horrors were not things brought on by tragic errors of my own character. In the words of Andy Dufresne from Stephen King's masterpiece Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, I was in the path of the tornado. I made a few mistakes in life but what happened to me as a consequence was so out of proportion to what I did that it makes no sense. Most of it was about things I could not control and did not do, was just born with.
That's true of a lot of people on this planet.
Because so many exercises go into the past and analyze it, rereading my morning pages overwhelmed me with all of it at once. I got depressed. I got PTSD symptoms again. I got flashbacks at inconvenient moments. I got pain-fog stealing days out of my life. I got the shakes. I got the nightmares. I got the unexpected rages and I cried for no immediate reason at things, even sometimes at good things, because they came so late into my life. I got the terrors and wound up dreading how fragile this good life is.
It's not. I don't think it will ever get as bad as it was.
I wrote an essay on a spirituality site that a friend who's engaged in philosophical discussion with me in email created and invited me to. One of the threads was titled "Why are we here?" I snapped.
I articulated my complete response for the first time.
I know why I'm here. I'm here because at every point when I could have chosen to die, I chose to live so that I could become a science fiction writer. That's why I put up with all the rest. The meaning of my life is something I decided to give it. Other than that, I have the same meaning to my life as that cat or a cougar in the hills or a wolf or a kestrel. I'm a living creature that seeks optimal conditions. I chose to migrate rather than fight a lot of times when I faced harsh conditions.
I'm responsible for choosing the meaning of my life and so is anyone else. Even a believer in Divine Will or someone whose religious path leads them to a decision to become a servant of God should recognize that their god would appreciate a willing servant far more than a slave who obeys anything he's told and accepts meaning imposed by others. But then, I can't speak for your god. I can't speak for anyone other than the one person I'm responsible for: me.
It's not fair to their future selves to even speak for the minor children I help take care of on these matters because they will come to face those choices themselves. There's my view of "Why are we here?" You're the only one who can answer that for you, bot you have no right to tell me what my life means. How it impacted yours, yes. But not what it should be. I am a science fiction writer, and I have come a long way on this quest.
I'm at one of the good points now, the things that in stories get a page or two or maybe only a transitional sentence before there's another exciting conflict. Fifty or sixty years of Bilbo's life vanished between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, and those may have been the more enjoyable years Bilbo had. I could stand some more of that while I face my chosen challenges instead of my enemies.