I've written some variation of morning pages since I was a teenager. If you're familiar with the work of Julia Cameron, you will have heard of morning pages, but for those of you whom have yet to have the pleasure, the gist is as follows. Wake up, grab a pen, a notebook and write. Yes, with your hand, not on a computer or tablet or dictated on the morning commute to work. Write three pages, across one side of a sheet of 8"x11" paper, or if you like a comp book as I do (they have that rigid cover so it's easy to write on them anywhere, like in bed or on the couch), I generally add a few pages more.
These are throw away pages, meant to clear out the cobwebs of the night's sleep and start you fresh for the day. They are not high prose, though sometimes a clever turn of phrase emerges or I'll write down an idea that startles me by its insight. More often, though, the morning pages feel like having a really good session on the toilet. After, my body feels lighter, my mind ready to conquer the blessings and challenges the day brings. I use them as a form of meditation, and my monkey mind is just as present when i sit to write these pages as it is when I sit cross legged and try to think of nothing. Or not think at all.
I'm fully committed to the philosophy that this life is simply an experiment, and this summer is the first part in the next step to manifest a new kind of life. I've made wonderful progress in some aspects of how I think and go about things, but I've also been stuck in a rut when it comes to others - like how I make a living, where I live, etc. I'm giving the time I write morning pages over to my blog, because I believe this is an important part of the shift. This morning I skipped both and went for a bike ride first, except I started late and didn't return home until noon. By then the heat had zapped my morning zeal and initiative. So here I am again, finishing my post for the day on the following one, a little after midnight.
I feel like I'm back in high school, or college, in a rush to complete a project just before it's due. These are definitely not all-nighters, but my mind and drive seem to wake up when others are tucked snug in their bed, out for a night of drinking, or even working the night shift. Or down in the Southern Hemisphere, perhaps in the midst of some school project due tomorrow morning.
In addition to crafting posts for Words and other adventures, I've been scanning photographs at the library as jpegs to upload to my laptop. My retired rugby cleats came in this box that I repurposed to hold prints, and the photos within have acquired curled or crumpled edges. Those shoes are buried beneath my broomball padding and shin guards in our storage unit, but the state of those photos had been on my mind of late. I pulled them out to make digital copies, to have access to them for daily use on the blog or elsewhere, but also to remember.
Looking back, even though I find it easy in the present to have regrets about what I haven't done, when I see these photographs that's the farthest thing from my memory. I think what an amazing adventure I've had, what incredible people I've been blessed to know (in the earthiest of senses, since I'm not a christian to say biblically), and oh, the places I've been... What a brilliant bit of luck and choice, or chance and choice as this boy I once knew would say.
The morning pages act in this fashion on the rare occasion when I peek back in a notebook, into time and the slice of perspective I had that day, or the time period it contained in its sheets. Sometimes when I read older ones - I do have journals dating back to high school, after all - I can't image that the person writing these sentiments, doing these deeds has any connection to whom I am at present. Seventeen year old me reads as a little crazy, though I have to cut her some slack that she was doing the best she could with what she, I mean I, had.
Their catharsis, though, has the same distancing quality as looking at old photos. In this case, the awareness that life is continual change comes as a relief. At times those emotions, almost always the negative ones, the weighty, oppressive, woe-is-me humdingers, hang around like a bad smell in a close, hot room. They are never going to go away. Until one day they have and that slice of you frozen in the photo, on the page, is a negative to the image you now carry within.
The photos aren't burdened with the weight of sad, irritated, content, betrayed, bored, madly in love or ecstatic. Even if you can remember you felt that then, it's only a story now, just like the writing I did all those mornings. A story after the time, being now, has slipped into the past.
This morning I didn't write, but that's just part of the story, part of the experiment, undocumented except for on this digital page. And there are plenty of photo files now to prove that the experiment so far has been a success, even when I had frizzy, tripod hair or ended up not liking the person I'd once been head over heels in love with, in the photo.
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