One reason routines are effective is that that they remove an element of thinking, and thinking takes energy.
You drink a banana smoothie every morning for breakfast because you’ve got the stuff out on the bench already; you go to yoga every day because you just do (a 30-day challenge helps with the learning not to think, just to do); you wear a black turtleneck every day because hey you’re chic and also it saves time (just an example, hi Steve Jobs); you write a short thing Sunday nights because it’s a way to start the week feeling like you’ve done something you like to do.
But routines can still get disrupted. You lose the thread, skip a beat, smash the damn car (just an example, no cars have been smashed). Anyway 75 days ago my husband decided to get sober after a while drinking heavily and to get therapy. One result was my Sunday nights of a spot of writing shifted to Sunday nights arguing/talking/lazing on our deck watching the stars. This was after seven years of living in a house where we did not ever sit on our deck watching the stars, incidentally. Some of the arguing has involved working out the trajectory of the moon rise and moon set.
I did what I like to do in crisis situations and read a few books. If you know anyone who is an alcoholic or who loves an alcoholic or is indeed a human being, I suggest picking up The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison (not Jameson, like the whiskey, LOL). She does stray into occasional deep analysis of drunk authors who struggled to get sober, and what it did or didn’t do for their creativity, which you can take or leave, but the most interesting part for me was her exploration of AA. In particular, her examination of the role the stories or narratives we tell ourselves about our lives play in both how we distinguish ourselves from others, and how the commonalities unite us with others in a potentially powerful way.
“At meetings, my stories were hardly the best ones in the room… But I also knew my presence was one small part of what allowed the meeting to happen at all — my body in a room along with everyone’s… I wasn’t supposed to tell my story because it was better than anyone else’s, or worse than anyone else’s, or even that different from anyone else’s, but because it was the story I had —the same way you might use a nail not because you thought it was the best nail ever made, but simply because it was the one lying in your drawer… At three days sober, you can tell someone on her first day what the second day was like for you… The paradox of recovery stories, I was learning, was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred. It was a paradox made possible by the acknowledgment of commonality: I happen to be at the centre of this story, but anyone could be.”
And I couldn’t help drawing some parallels between this idea of alcoholics being in a room together to give themselves support through their stories and a bunch of strangers coming together in the hot room to practise yoga to give themselves support but through their silence. I don’t doubt that it’s powerful to share you story and it’s helpful to others to share your story when you’re sober.
At the same time, there’s something powerful about coming together and practising with a group of people who all have different stories and different reasons for being in the room—but who don’t need or want to share them. It might be something as mundane as them wanting to get away from their children for an hour, or as serious as surviving a near-death accident, or something in between. Each of their individual presences is a small part of what allows the class to happen at all. There’s hope and struggle and vulnerability and pain and patience and doggedness in that room and everyone is immersed in it together. And every person who shows up shares a bit of their own with everyone else. It’s church without a god, if you ask me.
What else…
I’m not the one in therapy (yet… this almost made me want to start) but naturally I also tore through Lorrie Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed. See a NYT review here.
I did a boxing session and felt the anger real good. Still feeling it in my shoulders so much so that I groaned so loudly in agony when opening my car door yesterday that I felt the need to explain to a school parent getting into her car at the same time next to me what the hell had happened.
Finally getting around to Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room, a collection of interviews with well-regarded writers about their craft (review here), and Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit because I admit I do like a bit of a good and smart self-help book. (I’m also kind of interested in how someone who uses the body so intensely and purely in their creativity offers advice about general creativity.) Here’s an interesting NYT piece featuring her from last month.