So it’s Happy New Year! And time for a Fresh Start! And Evaluation of the Year Gone By! And Setting of Resolutions! And playing with distractions, like, do I need a coffee grinder that will grind beans fine enough for espresso! Because I cannot figure out the ending of my short story! And I am in despair!
I’ve been worrying that my brain is falling, albeit gradually and gracefully, off the rails, because the ending of this particular story is slippery; I cannot storyboard it, outline it, image-board it. It glimmers in the corner of my eye and then swims away into dark waters, flicking its tail saucily. When this happens, I imagine my brain plummeting, down, down, down, from one of those dramatic high trestle bridges over a roiling river, icy and filled with mysterious silver-green fish.
Embed from Getty ImagesEven as part of me feels terror at this fall, another part of me is wondering where such bridges exist, and do the rivers they span have silver-green fish and what would that color be called, anyway, and what would those fish be named and who named them?
And then the timer dings and again I have not gotten anywhere on the story ending. I have generated a list of questions that goes with my other lists of questions and ideas and concepts and free-writes and interesting imagery, stacks of lists tall enough to serve as trestle-bridge supports. Wobbly and unorganized and occasionally coffee-stained supports, but enough to get a steam-engine of a story across the gorge if I could focus on my writing.
Lack of writing focus has been balanced out by my focus on reading in December, however. I spent several hours at the end of 2014 immersed in Gordon Peerman’s book, Blessed Relief: What Christians can learn from Buddhists about Suffering. I don’t identify with either faith, but I relate to suffering.
I’m suffering, I say, as the story-ending vanishes again. I’m suffering, I say, as the timer dings and I have failed, AGAIN, to focus on my writing. I’m not really suffering, I say, as I read the newspaper. I’m suffering with privilege, I say, but it’s not real suffering. I should do some real suffering.
Peerman’s book provided me with a useful perspective on this hilarious-viewed-from-a-distance mindset, particularly with the Five Remembrances practice Thich Nhat Hanh shared in The Blooming of a Lotus. Peerman writes
The intention of this practice is to help you wake up to the significance of this moment, the impermanence of possessions and plans, and the significance of the actions you choose.
The five remembrances themselves are about aging, illness, death, loss, and the results of our actions; for me, they are a mindful articulation about “accepting that which we cannot change,” an adage so overused that it feels watered-down.
Watered-down, downstream, fluid, shape-shifting water, water that roils and dances, water that retains the power to erode granite, to reshape the earth’s contours, to shelter fish, to catch anything that falls from the heavens. Water that runs to the sea. Water that will bear my weight, float me forward.
If I allow myself to float on that water, then my precarious trestle of ideas, my angst-filled train engine of a brain, my inability to catch the glimmering fishtail of my story’s end — all these bits, all I say to myself about how these bits are making me suffer — they settle, they quiet, they slow. The train puffs to a halt on the bridge and I peer out the window at the river below and crack the window and breathe that crisp river air and the fish jump and sparkle and perhaps my traveling companion knows their name, and then I pick up my pen and return to my notebook, and I am immersed in the writing and when the train moves again its movement is gentle enough to be unnoticeable. Gentle enough, but powerful enough, too. It is enough, what I have. Whether or not I find The Ending to This Story: it is enough. There will be another bridge of ideas over another river, or there won’t. But right here, right now: this is enough. I have enough.
May it be so for your stories, too.
the Art of Practice 