up and up

I'm back! I kind of think that most people have stopped reading this blog since I've been such a slacker about posting, but oh well. Some of you are probably still there. Have I ever mentioned here the Demotivator poster on blogging? It seems appropriate. Let me link you to it... here. Despair.com is the best... in a depressing and yet hilarious way.

I live in Vancouver again, which means my phone has a hard time in the house again. I keep getting voicemails without missed calls. Texts seem to come through ok, and I even had a conversation with my sister, but we got cut off three times in the course of things. I think the moral of the story is that I need to take more walks. Walks are conducive to phone calls. They might also help me sleep better. That would be a bonus.

Today I wrote morning pages for the first time in months. I think I need to make it a habit again. For those of you who don't know, morning pages is longhand stream of consciousness writing first thing in the morning for maybe two or three pages. (Three is recommended, but I have small handwriting and it takes awhile.) It's an exercise I picked up when I went through the book The Artist's Way, which was a course on creativity and how to break some of the mental restraints that tend to block it. Morning pages are supposed to be a place to pour out all the hectic thoughts that flood your mind, so you can give them form and see the answers (and more importantly, the questions) more clearly. It calms the mind, because once all those things are down on the page, they're released from your head and not as much of a burden anymore. And it's also utterly unself-conscious writing. You're not meant to read or judge what you've written. It's a safe place to be completely honest with yourself. Kind of like therapy, actually, without the therapist.

I stopped writing morning pages shortly after graduation, because with full-time work and a commute of about an hour each way, it looked like I had to make a choice between morning pages and writing my story. The only way I would have time for both was if I completely stopped spending time with people, and I didn't really like that option. If I could have figured out a way to write that story while driving a car... but, well, I'm not one for dictation, even if I had a way to make good quality recordings. I need to see the sentences I'm constructing. So I quit morning pages, and instead I would get up early and head over to Starbucks to have my tea and spend an hour and a half writing my story before leaving for work. With that time in the morning, I could usually get almost all the way to my daily page goal before ever leaving for work, which left me more time in the evening.

Now, though, I'm feeling the lack of the morning pages. It seems like everything in my life is unfocused. There's too much formless (or vaguely formed) worry in my mind, and I can't get a grip on it without pen and paper. Everything takes form on the page, and I can only solve it when it has a form. So I started this morning, and it actually already helped. That's enough incentive for me to keep at it.

So once again, I'm back. Back to the blog, back to morning pages, back to people, and back to life, and I'm putting up a new song to mark the occasion. :)