My e-mail inbox is an amazing place. I don’t delete or archive my e-mail so I should first of all thank Google for indulging my bad habit. But it never fails, when I need something or fear something, the solution comes to me in my e-mail. Just this morning, as I was approaching this post with dread, I received an invitation to a webinar that would teach me how to develop “The Writing Habit.”
Well, it is so much easier to watch someone tell you how to develop the writing habit than it is to actually write, isn’t it? And, gosh, he might actually have something to say that could really help me… BUT, we all know how precious a commodity our time is and, I’m sorry but I don’t think Mr. Webinar could help me develop the habit any better than just sitting down at the computer and writing. The problem is that it has taken me to now to realize this and I’m still easy to fool and distract. No matter how many tips I read, it’s still work and it’s still going to feel like work so I best just get to it.
You know what else is an amazing place? The internet. This morning, to kickstart my writing, I was searching up quotes about time. I love looking up quotes online. I love the crazy attributions that get spread around. One quote was attributed to both Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon and I don’t think either one was correct.
We all feel oppressed by time. The demands of the day are bad enough but when you add in tomorrow’s worries and yesterday’s failures is it any wonder we feel pressed in? Baudelaire recommends us to “be drunken always” if we are to escape it’s oppression.
“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
Art, photography, prayer: they have the power of removing me from the time trap. Getting into that “flow,” that mysterious sense of being wrapped completely in an activity, a thought, a subject — that is a drunkenness that I crave. It’s the other demands on my time (laundry!) that don’t seem to be able to possibly create that creative flow that leave me annoyed, angry and resentful.
Coming back to reality after our week-long snowcation, I felt every inch of time’s oppression crushing me to the earth. It wasn’t long before exhaustion took over.
Sure, I can continue to experiment with the multiple exposure/ICM photography, but I better be happy with whatever I can shoot in 30 minutes because that’s all the time I get. Luckily this week we had some very interesting weather, with warm rain melting out two feet of snow and creating lovely fog everywhere, that made it a bit easier to pop over to Wolf Trap and grab a few (or 50 shots).
As always, it comes down to discipline. I tell my children constantly, “virtue is a habit of the will,” and who is in charge of the will?
