Practice, Practice, Practice; Emerson on Experience & Surprise

Still Sundays.

January 15, 2012.

Last time I wrote fiction was June 2011. It wasn’t even a story but a sketch of words. Prior to June, regularly putting down drafts of fiction, however incomplete, was March 2011. All in all, last time I wrote fiction every week, be it a paragraph for the novel or some story shared on this web space, was December 2010. It would be fair and accurate to state that I consistently tackled the craft of fiction from March 2010 to March 2011 regardless what was shared here—and it was a lot that was shared in this online space. In fact, every Tuesday, come rain or shine or travel. I wrote in planes. I wrote in subways. I wrote while walking. I wrote in my sleep. I wrote the first thing when I woke up. I wrote before I fell asleep. I didn’t get tired. I didn’t get bored. I was as unattached to outcome as the Universe is to our perception of timing.

It is March of 2012.

I didn’t mean to type the above sentence. I know it is still January. I am choosing to keep it there because I don’t mind the reminder that time is some subliminal message.

It is January of 2012.

I worked on the first draft of a short story yesterday. My fiction muscles are some waxing crescent.   Once a Navy Seal of words,  able to operate at Sea deep thoughts, through the Air of ideas, and glide back on Land, able to withstand her head dunked in and out of deep waters, yesterday I was confronted with my inability to zone in and out of the world of fiction.

All those who practice any craft know the simple fact: it is as much about practice as talent and ideas. In the world of social media where most can’t escape the reigns of instant gratification and some—any—kind of connecting is enough, often what one deems process is merely repetition, more of the same, and less practice towards something new. This can happen off the social network settings too. As there, so here. As here, so there.

In yoga practice, Marco Rojas often quotes the ancient practitioners, “Practice, practice, practice and all is coming.” Practice, practice, practice demands we know what is it exactly that we are trying to do differently than what we are doing now. An inch of precision changes the entire outcome.  Practice, practice, practice requires a balance between engaging with the information available all around us (what we are told is possible if we keep practicing) and staying inward (where only you are the audience, the critic, and the creator).

A simple example comes to mind. It took me some years but I can finally achieve the full wheel pose with ease after my body is heated enough. Some days it is still challenging, depending on how all the body parts are feeling and how open my “chest” (where lungs and heart sit) is in relation to my back. However, I am striving for the one legged wheel pose, or Eka Pada Urdhva Dhanurasana, where I can gracefully lift one leg up (people often incorrectly assume if you are or were a dancer, yoga comes naturally) without looking like I am going to die any moment. Ironically, it will require some kind of dying to lift that leg up. More accurately, it will require my letting go of what is already dead, to lift that leg up.

I don’t know why we bother carrying dead when the dead has its place on the shelves of time. Right next to us, not too far from the shelf of memory. It matters not if one speaks of dead in a literal sense, where a  loved one’s energy has transformed to an invisible form, or whether we mean by ‘dead’ a person or an experience—good or bad—that we can’t let go and continue to keep around. Some like the grapevine more than the grapes. You can do more with grapes, ripe or dry, than the grapevine.

Most of the fruits of practice, practice, practice, happen to fall out of the thin, invisible, blue air when you are least expecting. There you are, hardly trying or thinking, and you are doing it. Finally. And then you can’t ever forget and can only move forward to explore more. Exploring is not dependent on achievement.

Practice.

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My mother is reading a book for her book club for next month. She always tells me information about the author. She doesn’t want me to give up writing. Which character’s story does she want me to tell?

The book’s author provided information to all the resources from where she received support in the three years it took to finish her first novel. Mama wanted me to take a look at the links. I think they might be of help to others so I share them here:

Stony Brook South Hamptons Summer Art Institute

The Writer’s Studio

She shared those links with me because “a writer is someone who finishes” ( Thomas Farber) and a writer is someone who continues to practice the craft.

Last July I was awarded money to attend a writer’s workshop in Prague. My first “workshop” experience and my last or so I concluded thereafter.  It was great because it was in Prague and I had been yearning to return ever since the first trip. It was great because I got lucky and I was enrolled in the workshop with author Charles Baxter who is driven by the craft of writing first and foremost unlike others who are driven by awards and ego. I learned how conflict needed to develop even more precisely to move the narrative forward. I deduced this conclusion myself three months after the workshop. It was not handed to me after a review of my one story.

The most disappointing aspect of my Prague experience was realizing most “writers” were there to network, to find someone who will do something for them. No different than the noisy parade of social networking where everyone is panting to be seen, heard, “discovered.” No different than the many talented young people who can sing and are screaming to be picked by American Idol. There were not many in that workshop who were actually there to practice, practice, practice so as to take their skills to another level.

I know I ended up in Prague to complete a personal circle, independent of writing, so I could spiral forward. Therefore I remain grateful for the reasons we choose to do things and the Mystery that directs an unfolding beyond our understanding but distinctly for our understanding and development.

The aforementioned being said I can’t shut myself away from practice, practice, practice and exploring because of past experiences that didn’t turn out how I expected. This is not then. Now is now.

My mother said the author of the current pick of her book club, Helen Simonson, shared in the author’s note section of the novel that she began to finish her novel with the workshop and support of a class in 92nd Street Y. Interestingly enough, just prior to departure for Prague last summer, I visited the 92nd Street Y for the first time to attend a reading and question and answer by author Neil Gaiman.

It is Sunday and I must take a second look at the the almost complete first draft of the short story.

Practice, practice, practice and all is coming.

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I re-read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Experience” this Sunday morning. I get tired when I write. I take a break away from my own thoughts before I re-read, only once, what I have written and hit “post”. I felt the arms of synchronicity wrap around my thoughts when I re-read this essay by chance after I was done writing all of the above. I share a few excerpts only since it is a very demanding and long essay.

We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account: or if they live, they lose themselves in the crowd.

That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas, which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring them there.

To fill the hour, — that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.

Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future.

`You will not remember,’ he seems to say, `and you will not expect.’ All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experiences have been casual. The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely, and not by the direct stroke: men of genius, but not yet accredited: one gets the cheer of their light, without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird, or the morning light, and not of art. In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called “the newness,” for it is never other; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young child,–“the kingdom that cometh without observation.”

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarreled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power. 

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Most people quit because of experience. I am grateful to my parents who are living examples that one must continue because of experience.

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