The Grasshopper #58: Weird Optimism
It’s better than the opposite
The PGA Championship is in town and this place is golf crazy. It’s just down the road, literally, but I’m not going near it. I happen to be a big golf fan though I don’t play anymore. But it’s on the TV right now and for some reason it makes a great background for writing.
I write about a lot of negative stuff and sometimes it catches up with you. But not today and not most of the time, even though I wrote about the NAACP joining two other organizations in issuing a travel advisory for Florida for blacks, Latinos and LGBQT folks.
That’s just weird. But I get it. There’s a lot of division going on and it’s intentional. But here on The Grasshopper everyone is welcome and welcome to your opinions. As a writer I don’t want to exclude anyone from reading my stuff. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it.
But you have a choice and that is not the case in a lot of places. I don’t want our country to be one of them.
Selfy-helpy
There’s about twenty books on my shelves on Buddhist thought and practice. They are my version of motivational or self-help things and I dip into them when I feel a need for perspective.
I am a Buddhist but not in the religious sense. Buddhism is an atheistic belief system which means it does now believe in a higher power (gods). Buddhists find the higher power within ourselves. The Buddha was not a god, he was a normal man who awakened and taught that we are all awake but have lost awareness of it. Buddha literally means awakened one.
I mention this because that is what fuels the weird optimism in my title this week, the belief that we all have a kernel of decency. It just seems that some of us have buried it in the pursuit of power and greed.
Personal growth is a huge subject these days and advice for achieving it is ubiquitous and mostly empty and recycled stuff. The writing I look for is meatier, a little more work, and from the heart rather than pure feel good or escapism. It’s a gift when you find it. The last novel that really grabbed me was Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It just wound its way into me and the author pulled off a truly remarkable ending, no small feat.
In his two major novels (the other is All the Light We Cannot See), Doerr takes a dark situation and finds redemption in it, without descending into schmaltz. Those are my idea of personal growth guides because they reflect the best in life in the face of uncertainty.
I’m in a bit of a drought writing-wise this week. Not certain why but these things happen once in a blue moon and they don’t usually get to me. Politics, my main subject, is in a very weird place now and I’ve covered most of it. But I think I need a new topic in addition to the ones I tend towards.
This gets me to the subject of niches, as opposed to being a complete generalist. Having core topics suits me these days and it helps build a following of like-minded readers and writers. The trick is to avoid writing the same pieces over and over again. With a topic like US politics, it is hard to avoid circling back to similar stories because politicians constantly repeat themselves when campaigning and they are always campaigning, or so it seems.
I think of it as the pundit loop and after watching a bit of CNN these past few months I realize how limited their format of telling a news story and then bringing in panels of ‘experts’ to dissect it can be. Right now on Medium there is a flood of speculative stories about Russia from non-journalist writers pretending they have a clue.
Everyone is a pundit these days in my writing world. But the punditry model is not working for CNN and their ratings are way down. Fox, which I never watch because I cannot stand their vitriol and intentional lying for ratings, is also sinking without their chief jerk being on the air anymore. It turns out there was nothing there when you remove the screeching hysteria.
I think my drought might be because I’d like to see things calm down a bit but there's no possibility that is going to happen. I recently read an article about the relationship between time and attention span. The theory was that as our attention span narrows time moves faster as we gobble down bits of digital flotsam and jetsam. I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to that and I often find myself wondering where the time went.
How can I have written 58 weeks of this newsletter, for example? It seems like I just started it and it’s been over a year and a few hundred thousand words already.
I was always fascinated by the notion, often found in sci-fi and fantasy, that a person could enter an alternative world, spend years there and return to find out they had been gone for minutes. It’s a Narnia thing. In one of my stories the narrator goes to a place, loses his memory, and then somehow finds his way back only to discover a lot of time has passed, much more than he thought.
This is a writerly thing, to mess with time and memory, but it reflects reality which takes place in a series of moments. You can get lost in one. It happens to me when I get into writing mode and a long moment seems to put life on hold, and then you snap back.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who has experienced that. And it is a little addictive, in a good way.
The trees outside my windows are dense and green and in full leaf. The hotel puts out Adirondack chairs and it’s pleasant to sit out there in the morning, especially when you don’t have your own outdoor space.
I don’t write outside because it’s too hard to see my iPad in the daylight. It’s about the only place I can’t write. I don’t care about noise or other people being around. Trains are one of my favorite places to write when I’m not lazily gazing out the window. I haven’t been on any yet this year but I’m going to change that soon.
If you find yourself blocked, or as I prefer, in an inspiration drought, try to scribble down some words every day whether you’re feeling it or not. Even if they never see the light of day, they can help kickstart a stalled machine.
Did you write today?
Martin
1148 words
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I've always thought literature makes for better self-help than self-help books themselves. Still need to read Doerr, I've heard great things!