The Wisdom of Not Getting It All Done
Dear Courageous One,
Happy New Year!
This year I promised myself to NOT write down any resolutions. Resolutions were making me hyperventilate. Too many resolutions = high blood pressure. A list of new year’s resolutions howls, “Get it together! OMG, there is so much you need to DO!”
The notion of ‘getting it all together’ is challenging. To me. How about you? Got it all together yet? ;)-
“It” comprises so many different plans, hopes, attempts, actually impossible dreams, failures (try-try again-oh-WTF!), important To-Do-Lists and so much biopsychosocial STUFF, including housework, which always renews itself . . . Phew. Let's . . . not get it all together.
TS Eliot wrote a beautiful poem about the difficulty of getting it together. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock blew my socks off when I was fourteen. I didn't understand it, but I did: it was about missing out on real life, and the ravages of aging, the reality of existential angst, and love’s failures. An adolescent treasure trove, hello! Required reading for a precocious 14 year old in Calgary, Alberta. My mind was blown.
(Isn’t it wonderful to remember those writings or experiences of art or nature that completely altered our youthful perceptions? Very good for the brain to remember those times/events. Journal that out if you want to give your brain a delicious treat.)
Anyhoo, with Prufrock, I didn't and I did understand a lot of it, but I totally GOT the ending, which answered the questions of the poem. I encourage you it sometime when you are in the mood for melancholy and the meaning of life: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
Here is the beautiful ending, the answer to the poem’s (and life’s) mysteries:
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
but he was wrong—they were clearly singing to him, otherwise he couldn’t have written the next stanza! He was just being dramatic for the half-rhyme—Intrusive Letter Writer, Kaz)
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
(Intrusive Letter Writer again: Maybe the human voices are all filled with the busy-ness of life—getting ‘it’ all done—which pulls us out of our sea dream—making us lose touch with the magical sea-girls. Instead of the miracle of mermaids, we drown in . . . tasks.)
What does it mean? What do YOU think it means?
I don’t have the exact translation but for me it’s something about embracing the waves of the imagination, listening for the voices inside the sea (the actual sea, and the sea of the self and of life).
And OBVIOUSLY it's about hanging out with the sea-girls—lingering with those babes– and not measuring out one’s life with coffee spoons (an earlier famous line in the poem) but enjoying the coffee itself. Incredibly, I just remembered a poem of mine that is influenced by this poem, by those sea-girls, though I’d never thought of that until this very moment. (I’ll send it or link it for you next letter.)
Thomas Stearns Eliot! He could be such an angular grim writer but this poem glitters with humour and sensuality. Reading it makes me introspective, a little sad, calm. (Also: it makes me feel like going for a swim in the Aegean in July.)
Do you have a favourite poem? Feel free to share it with me and I’ll share it with the Courage Words peeps.
Take a breath. It’s all right. Spring will come, then summer. If we are swimmers, we shall swim again. We’ll meet those sea-girls. I aim to BE one of them, even if it’s lake water.
Yep. T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about it, but I’m writing my epiphany in a newsletter.
This is DEEP like the chambers of the sea: “It” will never be done. Until I am dead, I suppose, and even then all my pieces down to the molecules and atoms will be concerned, in their carbon-based way, with ‘getting it all together’– by breaking it all apart.
Is it any wonder that I cannot get it altogether when I live on a wild planet spinning around a sun in a solar system that is spiralling through the universe? It’s a miracle that I’m not permanently DIZZY.
Let’s give ourselves a pat on the back just for sitting up straight when we manage to meditate for a few minutes. Right? Breathing in. Breathing out. (Applause.)
Taking the dog for a walk. (You are BRILLIANT!)
Writing A SINGLE PARAGRAPH. (The mermaids are singing to YOU.)
One little humble task at a time. No more getting it all together. This is Buddhism 101, a course I’ve been taking over and over again since I was seventeen and first sat down to meditate with a Thai monk. Every time I finish, the prof sends me back to the beginning: all phenomena arises, comes together. And comes apart. Take a breath.
Related to this existential Not-Getting-It-All-Together Blog is the fact that I have to master another Zoom presentation. Haha! Nothing like working with An Online Application to stir up questions about the very meaning of one’s life on this planet.
This master class is sponsored by The Northern Ontario Writers Writers Workshop and Laughing Fox Writers, and brought to you by me! NOWW and Laughing Fox have kindly opened this event to the public.
The Flow and Focus Master Class provides practical neuroscience-based approaches to working with the body-brain-spirit to ease ourselves out of procrastination habits and mindsets.
The date is Thursday February 2nd from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. on Zoom. Here is the link, where you will find more info and a sign-up portal through Eventbrite.
As you may know, my area as a therapist is trauma, creativity and giftedness . . .
When it comes to procrastination and lack of creative flow, I bring a trauma-informed lens to the patterns, habits and sense of overwhelm that so many of us experience. (Including, obviously, me.)
When I use my own clinical wisdom and expertise on myself, I can assure you, it works very well. I’m always my own first patient when it comes to somatic/neuroscientific interventions and approaches. But, as TS Eliot also says, in The Hollow Men:
Between the idea / And the reality
Between the motion / And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Yep. That's for sure!
There is surprisingly little research done on creative and gifted people’s responses to trauma and ACES (Adverse Childhood Events) as these effect and influence their creative lives and habits. I informally collect such data when I host these workshops and masterclasses.
All right. This is a rather looooong letter. (I hope I haven't bored you.) You are worth it, as is Prufrock, poetry, and epiphanies.
May the mermaids sing to you soon.