Tag: writing

Story-Telling

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“Life is not measure by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” – Maya Angelou

I met my friend Phil on the side of Mt. Rainier in the middle of the night 20 years ago. The group I was with was just crawling out of our tents to get ready for a summit bid. The group he was guiding had started 1,000 feet lower down and was passing by on their way to the upper reaches of the mountain. He gruffly joked with me, “Keep that tent open, I think I’ll just crawl in and sleep awhile.”

Phil is a very accomplished climber and mountain guide – the first American to climb the north side of Everest, the eighth person to climb to the highest place on each continent, over 500 (I think) ascents of Mt. Rainier. But one of the most noticeable things about him is his ability to tell stories.

It seems like mountain climbers and story-telling often goes hand in hand. Probably because there is a lot of down-time waiting for the right time to summit. On our way to Everest base camp in 2001, we would trek one day and rest one day so that the group of 5 people who would be climbing Everest that season could acclimatize. On the days off, we’d just sit in the mess tent, play cards and tell stories.

Blogging reminds me of that. I’ve been blogging every day for over 6 months. The other day reading this blog post about lessons learned in marriage and parenting a special needs kid by Ab, I realized that blogging is part of my self-care. It’s a way of processing and sharing the things that I want and need to learn from. But it’s also just daily practice in telling a story.

On every trip I’ve done with Phil I’ve noticed how deep his relationship is with the people his climbed with over and over again. I’m thinking about a really nice man from Michigan that we climbed with both in Nepal and Peru, that Phil used to joke, “I keep saying to Bill that he reminds me of a helicopter. Just looking at him, it doesn’t look like he should be able to climb, but he does!”

Phil is now 70 years old and doesn’t climb much any more. But when I’ve visited with him over recent years, I’ve found that telling stories is a way to bring what means most alive to the fore. May we all live our best stories and then tell them again and again to celebrate where we’ve been.

Writing a New Chapter

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“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” – C.S. Lewis

I heard someone years ago make an interesting distinction. She said that she ran, but was not a runner. It stuck with me once I heard it as a way I could differentiate doing something without claiming that I was any good at it.

I ride bikes but I’m not a cyclist.

I plant and water things in my yard but am not a gardener.

I write but am not a writer.

Part of the reason that I don’t think of myself as a writer is that I’m an electrical engineer by education. The very last class I took before I got my degree was technical writing. I put it off until the very end because I thought it would be easy and found out the hard way, with my degree on the line, that it was just as challenging.

And yet I keep finding myself drawn to write. Recently I was selected to be part of the talented group of writers that make up the Pointless Overthinking blog. Since I am by disposition a lot like a golden retriever – happy, goofy and energetic, my reaction was pretty much along those lines: ecstatic, a little teary and enthusiastic.

I don’t join groups very often these days. I work as a freelance technical consultant primarily alone, I parent alone, and since my Budheo-Christian beliefs don’t align with any particular church, I even worship alone. So for me just applying to join a group is a big deal.

It was an even bigger deal for me to be selected because it came with the sentence, “We were looking for someone who likes to both tell stories and mix in a little philosophizing, and you perfectly fit that description.”

I think I need to update, for my own self-image and not as an act of hubris, that I might not only write but in fact might actually be, a writer.

(Here is my first post on the Pointless Overthinking blog: Creating Context.)

(photo from Pexels)

Emojis

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“If you are too busy to laugh, you are too busy.” – Proverb

In 1990 when I was college, I went with a group to stay with a tribe in the jungle of Ecuador for two weeks. When we were there, the chief of the tribe told us a story about how they used to hunt with blow guns and darts tipped with curare. They didn’t have curare in their area but would travel into Peru to trade for it.

Then in the 1960’s, Western medicine discovered that curare was a powerful paralytic that could be useful as a muscle relaxant. They bought up all the curare so that the tribe could no longer trade for it. Instead they switched to using shotguns which meant many of the small birds and animals that they used to hunt were no longer viable because the shotgun would blast them to pieces. According to the chief, about 500 words in the language used to describe those small animals and their habitats disappeared from their language. One invention and the ripple effect changed their lore and language.

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking that the adoption of emojis has changed our language. What did we do before the 🙏 praying hands emoji to indicate we were thinking and praying for someone but unable to say that because we didn’t know their spiritual tradition and/or maybe not even be certain about our own?

Or my personal favorite is the ❤ ❤ ❤  emoji which I use instead of having to dance around whether I like or love someone.

And we were able to indicate a sly reference before the 😉 emoji? Were readers ever sure we were joking before the 😊 emoji?

Thinking that using emojis meant that I wasn’t working hard enough to convey myself with language the other day, I tried to end a text with words that meant I was thinking about and appreciating them. Five minutes later, I erased the jumble of words I came up with and replaced them with ❤ ❤ ❤

 I’m pretty sure I’ve lost 500 words from my language at least. 😊

Witty Remark

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“Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” – Mark Twain

My kids and I were driving in the car up a long, gently rising hill when my son noticed a jogger on the sidewalk beside us. Here’s the conversation that ensued:

[My toddler]: What man doing?

[Me]: He’s jogging.

[My 6-year-old daughter]: Jogging is what you call it when grown-ups run because they are really slow.

Of course, I immediately burst into laughter and my daughter was delighted to have said something so witty that she has been trying to recreate the humor of it ever sense. Which is hard to do without the setup.

One of the things that fascinates me about witnessing my kids and their friends grow up is the development of their story-telling capabilities. Knowing that narrative shapes our inner lives as well as our interaction with others, I love talking with my daughter about the stories we read and see.

So when Mitch Teemley published this great post Hitting the Creative Bullseye, I thought about my daughter’s witty remark to see if his breakdown of the hallmarks of creativity helped analyzed why we laughed: is unexpected, feels right and surprises them.

Ticking through the points:

  • Was it unexpected? We were just chit chatting in the car so no one was primed for a joke and so yes, it was unexpected.
  • Did it feel right? Yes. There is so much undeniable truth to the remark “jogging is what you call it when grown-ups run because they are really slow.”
  • Did it surprise us? I think the benefit of being 6-years-old is that no one expects you to come up with observations that hit the mark so when you do, it’s both surprising and memorable.

Of course the problem is in repeating it. But that’s why we practice — so that we can access both wit and wisdom, the “Feels right” insight in the moments that are both unexpected and surprise us. Because after all, wit is often how grown-ups deliver wisdom so that others will remember it.

Marking the Trail

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“The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.” – Lao Tzu

Almost 4 years ago I was out walking on the day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas and came across these beautiful rock cairns on the shore of a little local lake. It was a calm and quiet morning with the chill of October in the air and I just stopped in my tracks, wanting to spend a sacred moment in the presence of this inspired creation.

I imagined that in the wake of something so horribly violent, someone needed to make themselves feel calmer by creating something beautiful. Of course I’ll never know if it worked for them but I do know that just looking at this impromptu art installation worked to soothe that raw and exposed grief I was feeling.

When I think about whether anything I do, say or write has any meta-effect on the world at large, I think of those rock cairns. I might be working out my own grief, demons, cares and worries but if I do it in a peaceful and creative way, I have a small chance that it will express empathy and understanding for others walking a similar path.

Most of the rock cairns I’ve come across are on hiking paths marking the way to go. They are minimally invasive ways to communicate that the trail continues here. They are ways that one human tells another that they’ve walked this same way and don’t want anyone else to feel unsure or to be lost. May we all continue to be rock cairns for one another, marking the trail with peace.  

Creating a Clean Slate

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“The power of imagination makes us infinite.” – John Muir

There is a small room on the top floor of my house that isn’t on the way to anywhere so it’s filled with kids toys: wooden blocks, games, a big dollhouse, barbies. I was helping (that’s code for doing all the work while my kids were present) clean it up the other day and wondering why kids don’t want to play somewhere that’s messy. After all, they aren’t living up to any social mores that tell them they need to be tidy. And when we were interviewed on the local news during the heat wave, my toddler licked ice cream off the table so some portion of the greater Seattle area knows he’s not worried about dirt, dust or germs. It must be something like to be creative they need a clean slate.

That reminds me of my writing process. I meditate and then I write. Meditation declutters my head of to-do lists and chatter. And clears the game board so I am free to make new associations. Most importantly, it erases any sign of “me” so my inner editor is not calling the shots.

Something I read in Shonda Rhimes memoir, The Year of Yes comes back to me as I think about writing. To paraphrase (because at the moment I can’t find my copy of the book which has certainly been disappeared in kid chaos) that her writing process is such that it feels like she has to run 5 miles to just get to the start of writing. And then if she’s interrupted, it’s like she has to run 5 miles back to get back to reality. And to start again, it’s running another 5 miles. I’ve heard other writers describe their process similarly like Brené Brown saying that she has to go deep to write and normal life ceases to be possible.

These descriptions make me think that like with my kids, creativity is sparked when we make some space to begin. There is a Zen saying, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day unless you are busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” And that makes me laugh, but mostly because it’s true. Just think of what I could create if I could clear my mind…

Believing In Myself

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“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

After five years of trying to get something published in a traditional magazine or newspaper and sending out 99 query letters, I finally received a “yes” yesterday. You know what I find harder than writing? Believing in myself. Believing that I have something worth saying. Because sending out 99 query letters has very little to do with writing and everything to do with believing in myself or at the very least believing that it is something I am called to do. If you do the math of 99 letters over five years, it becomes clear it is something that I do periodically. I have a full-time job and I also have 2 young children, one of whom was born in the middle of those five years. My attention has wandered, my internal urgency to get this done has flickered, my discipline to research editors and publications has waxed and waned. In the course of those five years, I’ve gotten a couple of maybes and other nibbles and surviving those when they didn’t work out might have been the most difficult of all.

Writing started for me about 8 years ago when I had the inspiration to record my dad’s story. My wonderful father was so good at supporting other people that it was hard to get him to talk about himself. He was 78 years old at the time and in great health so there was no urgency but I got him to sit down with me most Saturdays so that I could ask questions and record his stories. It was so fun and it brought a new intimacy to our relationship. Then about a year into my project, he went out for a neighborhood bike ride one day, hit a car and died. It felt as if the grief for this amazing man was taking up so much room in my heart that there wasn’t enough space for my lungs to breathe. So I started writing out his story as a way to process how much I loved him. I listened to those recordings and was so comforted by his voice and so grateful that I had them. I got a writing coach and the first thing I said to her was, “Listen, I am not a writer but…” She still teases me about that.

In the last few months when I have been blogging regularly, I realize it has given me the opportunity to practice believing that my stories are worthwhile. The regular act of clicking “publish” is building a muscle of submission, both to the faith that it’s safe to put my words out into the world and to the acceptance that I am called to keep writing.

That is what has ultimately led me to be able to submit 99 query letters — knowing that I am compelled to do this by something bigger than myself. Understanding that to be true means it isn’t just belief in myself but belief that the Universe can speak through my words when I bow to that ultimate power. Even saying that sounds far too grandiose for my sense of what I write and have to say. I don’t believe that me, as a person, has anything to unique to add to all the words in the world. However, I have come to see that it is all a work in progress by a force bigger than myself and what I have to do is listen and believe.