Life of simplicity: Starting from scratch
"Voluntary poverty can be the easiest step of all. . . . Gone is the struggle about this or that - all of it is forbidden. You own nothing. How much easier, how much simpler than our world of endless decisions between acquiring and not acquiring."
--Richard J. Foster: Freedom of Simplicity.
Topics in this post: Internet addiction, acquisitiveness, Carthusian monks, sacrifice, tidying my surroundings, schedules, skimming quotas, solitaries, rhythm versus novelty, library browsing quotas, travel quotas, Zen Buddhism and the arts, reading quotas, using simplicity as an excuse not to be simple.
*** 7 April 2008
One of my standard days on the Internet - which is to say, not good. Four hours of work done and three hours of unnecessary play. Even those four hours of work I would have liked to have cut back on. The Internet is an endless drain on my energy. I can't help but feel that, if my eyes were worse and it was therefore harder for me to use the Internet, I'd be better able to figure out what was necessary Internet usage and what was frills.
I think, on reflection, that my poor day is an indicator that I haven't made radical enough sacrifices yet. Cutting my Friends pages (i.e. RSS feeds) to the bone two weeks ago was a radical sacrifice for me, and nothing has happened except that my life is better now, because I no longer have as much skimming material to go through. Now that the change is made, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all; it feels like a reward.
I look at my flash drive - the one I use to transfer files between my Internet-usage computer and my word-processor-usage computer - and what I see is files. Lots and lots of files, many more than there were when I went online this morning. On my hard drive, the Temporary folder - the one that I use to temporarily store files in until I get a chance to look through those files - is half a gigabyte heavy. All of those files have been accumulated since last September . . . and that doesn't even count the files that I filed away elsewhere on the hard drive without reading. My military history file, for example, is one-an-a-half gigabytes of mainly unread material. That folder I started in December.
So I'm continuing to have a major greedy-grab problem, based on what I can only describe as impulse downloading. When I get interested in a particular topic, or a particular treatment of a topic, I have to have everything I can find on the topic right-now-by-god-or-heads-will-roll. That's what leads to the grabbing. And that's what needs to change.
A lot of the problem is that I grew up in a culture that regards the accumulation of possessions as highly valuable. About the only thing that seems to counteract this childhood training I received (not so much from my parents as from the world around me) is reading about people who strive to live lives of great simplicity and self-discipline. I just wish I was in contact with some of these folks. (Well, okay, I do know some authors who are far more self-disciplined than I in the writing department.)
I did post three messages - in threads I'd originally read offline - at Hermit's Slate. We'll see whether my posts draw any responses.
Meanwhile, I see that Into Great Silence is out on DVD in the United States. Acquisitive me wants it. I've been reading reviews of it for months. Here's its trailer, and here's its blurb:
"Nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world's most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monks' quarters for six months - filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions."
Other than the singing of prayers by the monks at periodic intervals, the film has no soundtrack; it also has almost no dialogue in its three hours. It wowed audiences in Europe.
*** 10 April 2008
I've managed to get myself back on a steady edit-and-publish schedule, which is good, because I have lots of work to do in preparing Blood Vow for publication. I'm gradually adding exercise and fiction-reading back into the mix, the latter in case my Muse decides to show up. He has a tendency to appear at the most awkward moments, when I'm not ready for him.
Considering that I got myself off the Internet only two days ago, I think things are going well. I continue to face temptations to go back online, but I know that those will fade, the longer I'm offline.
*** 11 April 2008
Matters continue to proceed well; I've written fiction for the past two days. I'm determined not to go on the Web till I get "Blood Vow" ready for layout, or till the end of the month, whichever comes first. I'm allowing myself to pick up e-mail in the meantime, but the longer I'm off the Web, the lesser the Web's hold will be on me when I come back online to do necessary work.
*** 13 April 2008
I read the blog entries on my Friends pages, and they were about writing, publishing, writing, writing, prehistoric animals (okay, I can always expect something like that on Maureen Lycaon's journal), writing, publishing . . .
I wanted to scream, "Where are the blog entries on simplicity?"
Actually, there was one. A friend started up a community called crankysavers, for folks who want to feel good about not spending money. But I really wish that the list of blogs I regularly read reflected my simplicity interests in some manner.
Later:
While reading a news article about modern Catholic hermits, I was struck by this paragraph:
"It takes time to get past the loneliness to the realizations and insights that come from prolonged exposure to silence and solitude, according to Paul Fredette. 'We're not talking here about the hush between television commercials or the quiet within the car when stuck in traffic. It has to be done for a prolonged amount of time. It takes at least a couple of weeks of exposure to begin to really be nourished by silence and solitude.'"
Yes. The longer I'm offline, the more I feel that nourishment. I haven't yet achieved my goal of going on the Web only once a month, but I did only go on the Web once last week, which is a small start. And today I was on the Web for three hours rather than my usual six to twelve hours. I think it'll be much easier, as a result, to return my normal schedule, and I'm also having a better sense of what triggers me into spending time on the Web.
So, though I'm not happy that I broke my resolve and went on the Web earlier than I'd intended, I still feel as though I'm making progress.
*** 15 April 2008
I fall, I fall, and yet again I fell. But every time I fall once more into my Internet addiction, I realize that I need to make deeper sacrifices to achieve greater self-discipline, and so I gain something - a silver lining to a dark cloud.
*** 16 April 2008
On our way to visit my mother in the hospital, Doug and I stopped at Washington Cathedral. He spent ninety minutes exploring the cathedral. I spent ninety minutes exploring the cathedral bookstore.
I'd hoped to find a bookcase or two that related to monasticism and eremitism in some manner. In fact, I found six bookcases' worth of books on the spiritual life - most of which related to monasticism in some way - as well as a bookcase dvoted to the Benedictines and the Desert Fathers and Mothers. I was in heaven. (The Desert Fathers and Mothers, for those of you don't know, were the first Christian hermits.)
There was also a book on the shelf with a title that was something along the lines of The Sin of Living Cautiously. I didn't spend much time looking at it, but its title encapsulated my thinking overnight.
Up till now, I've been approaching the process of simplification as "business as usual except for one or two sacrifices." My approach has been opt-out: If I didn't happen to notice that something was a problem in my life, I'd keep it. And even if I noticed that something was a problem, I've tended to chip away at it bit by bit, rather than tackling it whole, for fear that I'd discard something valuable.
But what if I were to take an opt-in approach instead? What if I were to assume that everything is a potential barrier to my goal of living in simplicity? What if I required every activity to prove itself harmless (either for regular use or for occasional use) before I allowed it into my life?
What a scary idea. But this whole-hearted approach could prove to be less wearisome than my trying to gradually chip away at a mountain's worth of activities.
I know that the activities I do when I'm in my writing mode don't harm me; nor am I harmed by reading writings related to simplicity - in proper quantities, in both cases. These are all activities that I know I can do regularly. Any activity beyond that I'm going to test until I'm certain that it's harmless to me. Here are the questions I want to answer:
1) Is this activity really necessary and/or specially enjoyable?
2) If so, can I practice this activity regularly without my becoming manic or otherwise straying from my schedule of simplicity?
3) If not, can I practice this activity occasionally rather than regularly? (If not, skip to Question #5.)
4) If so, can I practice this activity occasionally without my becoming manic or otherwise straying from my schedule of simplicity?
5) If not, is there a similar activity that would achieve the same ends?
6) If not, is there a way in which I can practice the activity differently so that it won't cause problems?
7) If not, is the activity inherently harmful to me, or is it becoming so through some other activity (or lack of activity) in my life?
I'm up to Question #7 as far as my Internet usage is concerned. :/ I suspect that I've answered Question #4 in the affirmative for watching full-length films/shows and for a handful of other leisure activities, but I don't want to rush to any conclusions till I've had time to detox from the Internet. As Paul Fredette put it: "It takes at least a couple of weeks of exposure to begin to really be nourished by silence and solitude."
Incidentally, the task "Tidy my surroundings and sort contents of boxes" is on my list of activities to test because, the moment I began thinking of my life in very simple terms, I realized that my surroundings are messy. Not as messy as they would have been up till a couple of years ago (when I began to get into the habit of cleaning up after myself occasionally - O strange new world), but it's still not the starkly simple cell that I would prefer to have.
(By the way, as a prisonfic writer, I find it delightful that prisons and hermitages use the same vocabulary for dwellings.)
So I'm going to tidy the floors and the furniture surfaces in the rooms that I use, shove everything into closets that I'm not currently using, then take everything out, one box at a time, and figure out which items I want to use, store, or dump, as I was beginning to do over the winter.
At any rate, I hope my list of current activities isn't too long. If I make the list too short, I'm afraid that I'll break it within a short time. I've already dealt with my usual problem of my inner tempter deciding that I should do whatever I've forbidden myself from doing; I woke up from my afternoon nap with an urge to put together the next issue of True Tales. My tempter was even kind enough to supply me with an editorial to write.
I jotted down an outline of the editorial in case I should decide to write it later, and then told my tempter to take a hike.
*** 18 April 2008
Not the best start to my experiment, although - with one exception, which I'll mention later - I kept to my list of acceptable activities.
Here's what I did today:
Talked to my mother on the phone. (I had lots of scattered conversations with Doug throughout the day, which I won't bother to note here.)
Ate while reading Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order.
Walked up to the Center (i.e. the town center), listening to a novel on my MP3 player as I did so.
Browsed through the public library, only allowing myself to take out one book of fiction and one book of nonfiction. (This is truly remarkable, given my usual borrowing habits.)
Stopped at the grocery store briefly to pick up needed items.
Sat in the Center, eating an ice cream bar and reading the Washington City Paper. This was where I slipped. Not with the ice cream bar, but with the City Paper; skimming through nonfiction isn't on my list of acceptable activities at the moment. I ended up spending forty-five minutes reading.
Walked back from the Center, listening to the novel as I did so.
Ate while dipping into the two books I had checked out from the library. The novel turned out to be boring; the nonfiction book was Dennis Okholm's Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants. By this point of the day, I should have been reading only fiction, as I'm duty-bound to read at least two hours of fiction each day.
Took a nap.
Woke up and read more of Monk Habits for Everyday People while eating. By this point of the day, I should reallyhave been reading fiction. I should also have been editing and proofreading.
Felt sleepy and restless. Usually when this happens, I call my apprentice - conversations with him always perk me up - but he was away at his debate society tonight, so I looked through my list of acceptable activities for a task that would awaken me. I ended up answering personal correspondence. For two-and-a-half hours. And I was argumentative in my letters, as I so often am in personal correspondence. (Reforming my letter-writing habits is one of my goals.)
Now it's bedtime, and I've gotten next to zero work done today. (I did get my daily quota of exercise done, though, which is very good.) Tomorrow I have to go to the Center again - I forgot to buy milk today - but I'm hoping that I can undertake that task better tomorrow.
*** 18 April 2008
I did. The first part of my day was basically the same as yesterday, but with the chaff discarded. I returned a call from my mother, ate breakfast while reading An Infinity of Little Hours, proofread Blood Vow, called my apprentice, picked a print novel from my collection of books, walked up to the Center while listening to my audio novel, briefly shopped for groceries, ate lunch at the Center while reading the print novel, walked home while listening to the audio novel, and took a nap. In other words, I only did activities that really needed to be done: communicated with my family (my apprentice is family), read about simplicity, proofread, exercised, read fiction, and did household tasks (grocery shopping).
I picked up the ingredients for pea soup while at the store. I think I'll make the soup now while listening to the audio novel; then I'll do more proofreading, edit a chapter of Lawnmowers, and, if I still have time, write to a friend. That will be a very full and profitable day.
If I haven't made it clear before, the foundation blocks of my professional life are reading fiction and exercising. If I do these two things regularly, my Muse produces. If I don't, he shuts down. So that's why I'm putting such strong emphasis in my schedule on those two activities. Editing, proofreading, and layout are also important activities in my professional life this month.
The trick is trying to keep my professional life going at the same time I'm trying to keep focussed on achieving a life of simplicity. It's a hard balancing act, but I know that, the moment simplification disappears from my life, so does my ability to do professional work.
*** 19 April 2008
Hurrah. An Internet session where I did exactly what I intended to do.
I went online, collected my e-mail, collected my Friends pages, checked a potential problem at my blog, renewed a couple of domains that needed to be renewed before the end of the month . . . and that was it. When I began to be tempted to surf for articles on monasticism and eremitism, I told myself firmly, "No," went offline, and browsed through the massive amounts of unread e-mail I have on my hard drive till I found old posts from the e-mail lists Catholic Hermits and Monastic Life.
Total time spent online: Less than an hour. I don't feel manic.
Later:
Now I do.
My post-Internet experience - reading lots of posts from e-mail lists - helped me to pinpoint a cause of my mania: skimming. I'm currently reading two self-publishing lists, but I'm going to stop doing so. Any big news in the self-publishing world will reach me through the blogs.
I'd suspected for a long while now that skimming was problematic for me, since it's one of the things I haven't done during the periods when my life is blissfully simple, but I hadn't realized before skimming was that problematic: enough to make me manic in the space of a single hour. So now I have to figure out how to minimize skimming in my life. That will be a massive job, given how much skimming I've been accustomed to doing.
And oh dear, library browsing counts as skimming, doesn't it? So do lots of other little things, like glancing at the local paper and sorting through my e-mail. And of course Web surfing does, always. I think I'll have to start by giving myself daily and weekly skimming quotas.
Later:
Okay, I've given myself an offline skimming quota. And while I'm at it, I've given myself a quota for weekly online time. I can't believe I haven't done that before now.
I'm pleased that, after only four days of trying out this new opt-in method, I've already managed to identify one of the contaminants in my life.
*** 20 April 2008
I've added editing, proofreading, and layout to my list of tasks I can do without breaking from my regular schedule.
I'm continuing to read An Infinity of Little Hours. All of my warning alarms as a journalist went off when Nancy Klein Maguire wrote in the introduction, "I have included nothing that could not have happened, but I have not bound myself to reproducing an exact chronology." Indeed, it becomes obvious within a few chapters that Ms. Maguire is of the Randy Shilts school of narrative nonfiction, inventing episodes to serve as dramatic backdrops to thought processes that she presumably learned about from interviews, letters, etc. I say "presumably" because the big drawback of this type of semi-fictional narrative is that the reader is left without any certainty as to which parts of the book actually happened and which were invented. I'm as big a fan of narrative nonfiction as anyone - it's the type of journalism I usually do myself - but I would have preferred a close adherence to the actual events, even at the expense of rich drama.
That's the drawback of the book, but the narrative is compelling, and the book offers lots of information about Carthusian life that I'd never known before.
*** 24 April 2008
I can't quite put my finger on what's bothering me about An Infinity of Little Hours. All I can say is that, every time I finish reading a chapter, I ended up feeling as though I'm pathological for enjoying simplicity and structure.
Even though Ms. Maguire has one of the novices refer to the "intoxicating solitude," she seems to be more aware of the negative aspects of Carthusian life than the positive aspects. Maybe that's because she's drawing mainly on the memories of ex-monks. I suppose that a description of the military that was based primarily on the memories of men who had quit the military would similarly have a negative tinge.
Certainly there are negative things about monastic life, both things that monks are aware of and things that they aren't. (The chapter about Carthusian sexuality was particularly sad to read.) And this book is a refreshing contrast to the many white-washed descriptions of monastic life.
But when I read the writings of people who enjoy the contemplative life, I get a much richer sense than I'm getting from Ms. Maguire's book of why the contemplative life can be enjoyable. Quite often, when Ms. Maguire describes someone's enjoyment of Carthusian life, she does so in terms that suggest to me that she faintly disapproves of the enjoyment. Here's the type of passage I mean:
"Chuck adapted to the Charterhouse so well that he was almost invisible. He had what he had always wanted - rules that told him exactly what to do. He did not have to make decisions; he didn't have to assert himself."
No sense there of structure and submission as a glorious enterprise, worthy of high praise (if done correctly, with the right participants). Perhaps I'm reading too much into the passage, but I get the feeling that the author believes that Chuck opted for the easy way rather than taking the better, more difficult road.
*** 25 April 2008
I've been keeping (more or less) to my half-hour-per-day skimming quota this week. I found myself reading more slowly and carefully tonight than I've done in a long time. I suspect that the second activity is due to the first.
I'm beginning to think that my vow of simplicity is likely to turn out to be "No skimming." Or at least, as little skimming as possible - the skimming equivalent of voluntary poverty. It's becoming quite clear to me that the activities which cause me to lose focus are all, in some manner or another, skimming activities: skimming writings, browsing the Web, watching videos, conversing with people I don't know well, travelling to places I don't often visit . . . My danger spots are things that I'm likely to skim quickly over, either because they contain a lot of boring material or because they require rapid-fire thinking/reading from me. Anything that's dull, quick, or relatively unfamiliar to me triggers my skimming instinct.
The activities that I can focus closely on are familiar activities, done daily or weekly, that are interesting enough to keep my whole attention or that require me to concentrate by virtue of how they're presented (for example, reading in braille, which I don't do well enough to be able to skim).
My acquisitive tendency is a separate but related problem: the more acquiring I do, the greater my tendency to skim in order to acquire more.
My new custom of walking while listening to text-to-speech audio books is working out so far, though it's still unfamiliar enough that I can't fully concentrate on the books. In light of what I wrote above, I'm going to slow down the text-to-speech (which I can do). I already have the software set to record the text to play slower than average, because I've always had difficulty processing information that arrives by ear (I'm fairly sure that I have audio processing disorder), but the text still isn't slow enough, I think.
*** 26 April 2008
Well, I can't say that today was exactly a triumph against my Internet addiction, but I made a small amount of progress.
I've had the problem that, when I go online, I want to check my e-mail while I'm online to see whether there are any letters that need to be urgently responded to before I go offline for another week. Checking my e-mail while online feeds my addiction, for various reasons.
So today I downloaded my e-mail, read it offline, wrote replies offline, came back online, sent off my e-mail, and did Web work.
Something I learned: Not to try to do personal correspondence this way. I'm better off reading and responding to personal e-mail gradually over a week's time.
However, this method of writing e-mail offline did keep me from sending off a post I composed to one of the self-publishing lists. The post was totally unnecessary, and would have kept me hooked to reading that list rather than going to "no mail" on it. If I'd been responding online, I would have realized this after I sent the post.
Other than that, it was another typical Internet visit - too long, too much time wasted on non-necessities - but I feel better today than I did last week after visiting the Internet, probably because I know that I'm firmly committed to staying offline till at least next Saturday.
One online goodie I do feel pleased at discovering:![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif)
solitarybird_lj, the blog of an Episcopalian hermit. And not just any Episcopalian hermit, but one whom I'd read about recently in New York Magazine. I'm enjoying reading through her blog entries, which I downloaded.
Oh, and I also kept within the three-and-a-half-hours-weekly online limit I'd set for myself.
Later:
I totted up my weekly totals. Overall, a good week, though I didn't reach my ideal hours in any of my writing-related categories. Also, my hours for exercise remain high, and I managed to cut down the number of hours on leisure activities and blog-entry writing, which is good.
What concerns me is that it took me three days to recover from my last Internet addiction spell, and I'd no sooner gotten myself back onto a regular writing schedule than I went online again. I really need to get myself onto a schedule of only going online twice a month. Especially since I'm running over my deadline of getting my next e-book out.
So I've set that as my next goal: Not to go online till May 11. By then, I should have my e-book, audio book, and booktrailer ready to publish. If I manage to stay offline, that will be a new triumph, because the longest number of straight days that I've managed to stay offline during the last few years has been ten days (last December).
*** 27 April 2008
I've finished reading the blog ofsolitarybird_lj, and my goodness, it's a treasure. I recommend it, from beginning to end, to anyone who's interested in the lives of hermits, or in related topics.
Here are excerpts from a couple of entries I especially liked:
* * *
Even in silence and solitude I am having trouble disciplining my thoughts. Sometimes Morning Prayer goes like this...
"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name..."
I want a cheeseburger.
"Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth..."
A paw pats my leg insistently. Jeoffrey, who has not taken a vow of silence, meows; he wants a cheeseburger too. . . .
Save us from the time of trial.
* * *
6:30 a.m. Loud purring wakes me. The cat has taken on the role of hermitage alarm clock. Opening one eye, I see him staring, and can imagine him saying, "Benedicite!" in good monastic fashion. Sending a sleepy thought heavenward, I mutter, "Deo gratias..." then begin to drift back to sleep. This earns me a pat on the face from an impatient paw.
A day in the life.
* * *
That second entry inspired me to record my own activities on this blog tomorrow. If nothing else, doing so should help keep me on track.
Concerning the Internet: After thinking it over, I've concluded that trying to read my e-mail before I go on the Web is not such a hot idea after all; it merely adds to my mania. And what's my big hurry in answering e-mail? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the world won't end if someone has to wait a week to hear back from me.
So I'm going to try to just download my e-mail next time and then gradually read it offline over the next week or two. That will give me greater armor to tackle my Web activities . . . which are major next time. Even though I can do the list announcements offline (thank goodness), I still will have to upload nearly my entire domain, upload my e-book editions to Lulu and Amazon, post my blog entries, announce my Website updates / e-book to my blogs and MySpace profiles and about two zillion comms/asylums/lists, not to mention having to send off review requests. . . .
It's going to be a nightmare. I'm hoping that staying offline for a fortnight will give me at least a bit more preparation than I've had in the past for this sort of exercise.
*** 28 April 2008
Below, my day. This isn't a typical day. This is an ideal day - the way I'd like, more or less, nearly all my days to go.
2:20-3:05 PM - Simplicity: Meditation on a manuscript.
Yes, I'm up late. I usually sleep from midnight to noon in the winter; now that the weather is warm, I'm trying to get myself up in the morning, but for some reason I overslept today.
I'm scheduled, upon waking, to write fiction and edit what I've written. However, I'm still in recovery from Saturday's Internet spell, so that's out of the question today. Instead, I did an old practice: meditating on a manuscript. I won't record the full process here (it's based on the medieval squires' Vigil of Arms and the iconographers' traditional vigil before an icon they've created), but essentially it's a way to get myself in the proper mood - respectful of the duty I'm to undertake - to do a final edit on manuscript - Lawnmowers, in this case.
3:05-4:00 - Read fiction: Read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Other Wind while eating vegetarian pea soup, whole wheat bread, and juice.
Reading fiction, along with exercise, is the foundation of my day. I usually do it while eating.
4:00-4:10 - Leisure: Read a picture book: Ludwig Bemelman's Madeleine.
Just a brief break for fun. I'm in the process of rereading all the picture books I own, which will take me months.
4:10-5:10 - Read fiction / do household tasks / exercise: Unload the dishwasher, hang up clothes, clean the bedroom floor, and tidy my desk while listening to Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills.
A classic case of me combining a bunch of activities at once.
5:10-5:40 - Friends/family: Talk with my apprentice on the phone.
He was feeling depressed, his car having unexpectedly broken down, with a resulting bill so large that he can't afford to visit me this summer. I did my best to cheer him up.
5:40-6:45 - Edit fiction: Edit "Lawnmowers" while drinking hot chocolate tea.
You read that right. It's my own special mixture: herbal tea (black cherry in this case, though I'm strangely fond of hot chocolate chamomile tea) steeped in hot milk, and then mixed with one tablespoon each of cocoa and malt Ovaltine. It tastes like flavored hot chocolate, but it's cheaper, less sugary, and fat-free.
Oh, and I'm now two-thirds of the way through editing Lawnmowers.
6:45-7:20 - Publish fiction: Lay out domain while listening to the Beatles.
Web layout is dessert for me. It's what I do when I'm tired of doing harder stuff.
7:20-7:40 - Family/friends: Talk to my mother on the phone, and then look up and discuss with Doug the meaning of the Ancient Greek word luô ("loose"), which appears in Matthew 18:18.
My mother is in rehabilitation from an operation, so I've been calling her daily.
Doug is listening to a video lecture on Luther right now. Upon my consulting the Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon (trivia moment: the Liddell in question was the father to Alice Liddell of Alice in Wonderland fame), we discovered that luô originally meant loose, and then was applied to loosing prisoners, and eventually ended up (in Euripides) meaning "atone." All those layers of meaning appear in the Matthew passage. I love Greek.
7:40-8:10 - Read fiction: Read The Other Wind while eating natural peanut butter and banana slices on whole wheat toast, cream cheese and pear slices on whole wheat toast, and milk.
I'm awkwardly in transition from my winter schedule to my summer schedule, which is why today, oddly enough, I have only two meals.
8:10-8:30 - Simplicity: Read Angela Zito's interview with Philip Gröning, director of Into Great Silence, the film about Carthusian monks.
Much needed, because I'm feeling frazzled by this point. Gröning turns out to be that rare treasure: an artist whose thoughts on his creations are deep. Most of us are better at creating than at talking about what we've created. (I've been discovering that this month as I try, without much success, to articulate to a correspondent some of the things I said in Twenty Thousand Gold Stars in a much better way.)
By contrast, here are some juicy quotes from Gröning:
"I had an accident on the shoot. I fell off a cliff wall, 18 feet down, vertically onto a patch of gravel, and I thought I was dead but I wasn't. There were 40 seconds - I studied medicine and lying there, I had no pain, and I thought, OK 18 foot cliff, vertical fall, no pain. You broke your neck, you have 45 seconds and it's going to go dark, another 50 seconds and it's going to go silent. So I was looking up and thinking, everything is so beautiful. Then once it was clear that I could move, I started thinking about a broken cable on the camera. And then I had a total breakdown and started to cry, because I was so overwhelmed by having lived, and on the other hand, by how quickly I was willing to go back into efficiency. What are we really doing with this obsession with efficiency, what are we doing with our lives?"
"Repetition, on a personal level, is the deeper way of understanding. Learning something new every day is not getting you very far. Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it's in the film - the monks' life is repetition. It's a different approach. . . . you say to yourself, I'll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time. Which is maybe broadening your horizon, but lessening your touch."
"The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don't have problems with it, it's not your religion."
8:30-9:55 - Journal: Write Life of Simplicity entry while listening to choir music.
What I'm doing now. I want to get up earlier tomorrow, so after I finish up the next couple of tasks, I'll go to bed.
9:55-10:05 - Simplicity: Add up total hours for the day while listening to choir music.
Given my eclectic tastes in music, I might be listening to anything, but I tend to listen to quieter music at night, as a way to wind down. (Mind you, a cathedral congregation singing at the top of its lungs can be anything but quiet.)
Here are the total times for today, which doesn't include preparation time or brushing teeth or other little stuff like that. The time in parentheses are my approximate goals for the daily times for each activity.
Write fiction - 0 (minimum of :45).
Edit fiction - :40 (minimum of 1:00).
Read fiction - 1:35 (minimum of 2:00).
Publish fiction - :30 (minimum of 1:00).
Exercise - :40 (minimum of :45).
Household tasks - :40 (minimum of :30).
Family/friends - :45 (no more than 1:00).
Simplicity - :45 (no more than 1:00).
Journal - 1:15 (no more than :45).
Leisure - :05 (no more than :30).
Overall, a good day. I would have gotten more done, obviously, if I hadn't decided to go to bed early.
10:05-11:05 - Journal: Finish this entry, rewrite it, shower, and go to bed.
*** 29 April 2008
Rereading the above entry, I'm wondering whether anyone can really grasp the significance of my schedule. Except for the meditation on the manuscript, it probably looks like any writer's average workday (other than me doing a lot less work than the average full-time writer. Curse my need for twelve hours of sleep).
To explain why the schedule has a higher significance, I'm going to go back to what Gröning said:
"Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it's in the film - the monks' life is repetition. It's a different approach. . . . you say to yourself, I'll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time."
Actually, the word I would have used is not repetition but rhythm. Screwtape (the fictional devil invented by C. S. Lewis) talks about the value of rhythm in The Screwtape Letters:
"The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He had made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast."
Exactly; that's the power of rhythm. But then Screwtape goes on to talk about how this desire for rhythm can be twisted:
"Now just as we [devils] pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity or snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.
"This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire." [A pause as I look at my gigantic bookmarks list and nod mournfully.] "The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of dimining returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both." [A pause as I look at my giant book collection and sigh.] "And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure . . ."
Enough; he might as well be writing the story of my life.
At any rate, that's why my schedule is playing a pivotal role in allowing me to regain control of my life. Instead of focussing my schedule on novelty - that is, on obtaining new things all the time - I'm focussing my schedule instead on rhythm: doing the same activities over and over in a particular order, but with a content that varies slightly each day. Write fiction, edit fiction, read simplicity writings, read fiction, exercise / do household tasks, write/edit/publish fiction . . . There's plenty of scope there for variety, even without taking into consideration my occasional breaks for leisure activities, such as library browsing. Yet the solidity of permanence that underlies my schedule gives me an anchor that keeps from flying off on the wind of every whim as though I were a kite without a string.
This is all very different from my greedy-grap approach in the Internet world, where I'm forever searching for new things, and where I'm annoyed if I don't end up with tons of new exciting discoveries after each Internet jaunt. That sort of "Must . . . have . . . novelty" approach to life is exactly what I am trying to get away from. Small changes within the scope of rhythm: that's what I'm striving for. And that's why a day like yesterday is so very much more satisfying to me than spending nine hours on the Internet, downloading dozens of texts and videos.
More satisfying but less seductive, which is why the Internet remains a danger for me.
*** 30 April 2008
Today, the first words I read (from Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) were as follows:
* * *
Peter Levi says in The Frontiers of Paradise that monks "become like good children playing at being good." Children, of course, love to make up rules and follow them, to continually say, "as if." Monks are behaving "as if" constancy were possible in this world, and as Levi observes, "at any visitor's first entry into a monastery, time seems to stand still." He adds that "this new time-scale . . . has nothing to do with death and eternity, but involves a tranquil, unhurried, absolutely dominating rhythm" and concludes - correctly, I believe - that this liturgical "sense of time is the greatest difference between monastic life and any other."
This is an outsider's perspective, of course. Monks tell me that this seemingly peaceful life can become hectic for them. But their ability to maintain a schedule, centered on the liturgy, does set them apart from the rest of us and, over the years, submission to liturgical time can develop a playful patience that is very much at odds with worldly values.
* * *
Eerie, because I'd woken up thinking about time and patience. Specifically, I'd been looking at my schedule for the month and facing once more the reality that going on the Web destroys my schedule.
Here's what my last two months look like, in terms of writing and online usage:
MARCH
1: Went online.
2: --
3: --
4: Went online.
5: Went online.
6: Went online.
7: Went online. Wrote fiction.
8: Went online. Wrote fiction.
9: Wrote fiction.
10: Wrote fiction.
11: Wrote fiction, then went online for seven hours.
12: --
13: Went online.
14: Went online.
15: Went online.
16: Went online.
17: Went online.
18: --
19: Went online.
20: Went online.
21: Went online.
22: Went online.
23: Went online.
24: --
25: --
26: --
27: --
28: --
29: Wrote fiction.
30: Wrote fiction.
31: Wrote fiction.
APRIL
1: Wrote fiction.
2: Wrote fiction, then went online for six hours.
3: Went online.
4: --
5: --
6: --
7: Went online.
8: --
9: --
10: Wrote fiction.
11: Wrote fiction.
12: Wrote fiction.
13: Wrote fiction, then went online for three hours.
14: --
15: Went online.
16: --
17: --
18: --
19: Went online.
20: --
21: --
22: Wrote fiction.
23: Wrote fiction.
24: Wrote fiction.
25: Wrote fiction.
26: Went online for three hours.
27: --
28: --
29: Wrote fiction.
First of all, I'm pleased by the fact that my Internet usage has gone down from sixteen days in March to six days in April. (Prior to December, when I deliberately adopted a simple life, my Internet usage was every day of the month, for several years running.) But as you can see, for the most part, I continue to follow my old rule that, if I go on the Web, it takes me at least three days to recover before I can write fiction again. That April 26 was a carefully scheduled visit to the Web made no difference. It still broke my pattern of daily fiction-writing.
That being the case, I'd like to see whether I can switch my Internet usage to the pattern of surfing the Web only once a month, but picking up my e-mail and Friends pages weekly. I don't know whether I can manage this; every now and then I'll have some research problem that can only be resolved by a Web search. Nor am I sure to what extent e-mail contributes to the problem. But I'd like to see whether this new type of schedule will help to resolve the problem of my daily custom of fiction-writing smashing to pieces every time I go on the Web.
Meanwhile, I'm making a good deal of progress in my problem of uncontrollable browsing offline. I was at the public library today for my new schedule of a once-weekly visit, and I was glancing through the new nonfiction books. I had my eye on a popular history book about the early 1900s, the sort of book that I would end up skimming. I found myself thinking, "I can only take out one nonfiction book during this visit, and I'm only allowed thirty minutes of skimming time per day. Is this book really worth taking out?" And the answer was, "No, of course not. I have much more valuable primary sources from the early 1900s on my hard drive that I haven't read yet."
I ended up checking out Marcia Ford's Traditions of the Ancients: Vintage Faith Practices for the 21st Century, which quotes liberally from the Desert Fathers. For the one fiction book I allow myself to check out weekly, I chose Diana Gabaldon's second Lord John novel, which I haven't read yet. No need to check out CDs; I still have some on hand from last week. Total time spent at the library: one hour.
Contrast this with my previous pattern of library borrowing, which would have been to spend hours at the library, bringing home a backpack full of books that I mainly skimmed or set aside without reading before heading back to the library within a day or two. My total skimming time would have been enormous, and I wouldn't have spent much time with books I really, really wanted to read.
Later:
Well, that trip to the library wasn't as innocuous as I'd thought. I ended up spending the rest of the day skimming writings.
I don't think the library trip was the only thing at fault. I'd gotten myself into one of my "must have information right away" moods that sent me sailing through a lot of books in search of information that I really didn't need away. I need to watch out for that.
One of the bits of information I found that I didn't need right away but is nonetheless interesting is that the Buddhist practice of mindfulness has a Christian parallel: memoria. Apparently that's what St. Benedict is referring to in his first degree of humility, though his way of phrasing it is rather negative ("Don't forget about the hell-fire!").
I'm rather worried about my planned trip to D.C. on Sunday. Will it send me off on another skimming spree? I'd really like to see the David Macaulay exhibit while it's still at the National Building Museum (the exhibit ends on Sunday), and I'd like to see my father, whom I've only seen once since Christmas. And - *cough, cough* - I'd like to visit the main branch of the D.C. library.
I think the reason it becomes difficult for me to practice simplicity whenever I leave the house is that, quite simply, my life becomes complicated then. I have much more sensory input, more decisions to make, more things to distract me. I can't fully concentrate on anything, because things are coming at me too quickly and in great quantities. In other words, I'm placed in a "must skim" environment.
When I go online, the situation is much the same.
I'm stealing the passage below fromsolitarybird_lj, though I've read it before. It's an excerpt from a very brief monastic rule given by St. Romauld to the Camaldolese hermit-monks in the eleventh century. The more that I attempt a simple life, the more seriously I take this piece of advice.
* * *
Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. . . .
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him.
The full rule.
* * *
*** 1 May 2008
I'm still trying to decide about whether to go into D.C. on Sunday. My father won't be home on Sunday - he and my stepmother are going to Western New York to do research - so I don't have him as an excuse to justify my trip.
I've been looking at the last few months of my schedule charts, which are color-coded: a red star on the days I write fiction, a green star on the days I read fiction for at least two hours, a silver star on the days I exercise for at least forty-five minutes.
The three colors tend to cluster together. It's hard to determine cause and effect from the charts alone, but I know that, on the days I don't exercise, I find it hard to sleep and can't concentrate the next day. And I know that, when I read a lot of fiction, I tend to end up writing fiction.
The only things that remains absolutely clear is that my going on the Web results in the loss of red stars.
*** 2 May 2008
I've had what I have to call a library addiction fall: I went to the library for the second time this week and brought home half a dozen books.
I'm increasingly feeling that, as a beginner to this life of simplicity, I need to set a routine and stick to it, as far as I can. I'd like to stay at home as much as possible this year, confining my expeditions out of the house to a once-weekly visit to the Center (the library and grocery store) and a daily walk around the lake that's across the street from me. Whether I should have a once-a-week sabbath from my work, going out of of town with Doug, is something I'm still uncertain about. This Sunday I'll definitely be going into D.C., since my mother has told me she needs clothes delivered to the rehabilitation hospital she's at. We'll see how that goes.
On a separate topic: I've started rereading The Letters of Evelyn Underhill as one of my simplicity readings, only to discover that the first third of the collected letters are pre-WWI. How delightful to be able to do writing research at the same time I'm doing simplicity readings, and the letters are just plain fun to read. They're permeated with charity in the good sense of the word - Underhill is forever phrasing herself in the kindest possible manner to correspondents who (I gather from reading between the lines) are rather querulous. I'm taking mental notes, because, while my correspondents make for much easier reading than hers must have, my own correspondence style could do with a great deal of improvement.
Later:
All right, I've reworked my schedule, leaving open the possibility of a daily out-of-town visit, and am permitting for now a weekly library visit, though if I keep going on these library binges, I'll have to rethink that. Other than that and obligations to family and friends (I need to visit my mother daily next week when she comes home from the hospital, for example), I've given myself a set schedule for each day. It's the same schedule I've been trying to follow recently - and have been succeeding in certain respects, for example in the daily walk - but I'm going to attempt to keep fixed upon it from now on. We'll see how matters go tomorrow. I really need to get myself back on track, because my hourly totals for work this week are going to be abysmal.
Later:
Among the books I picked up at the library today was Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, which has some interesting suggestions on the connection between art and meditation. I'd expected the book to be rather esoteric, insofar as I'm not well enough couched in Eastern worldviews to fully understand books on Eastern belief systems. However, so far, one of its main messages - if you produce art, you have to concentrate on what you're doing, not on the fact that you're producing art - just seems to me to be common sense. If a centipede thinks about his feet when he's walking, he'll trip.
I came home and looked up encyclopedia articles on Japanese arts such as gardening, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, martial arts, and so forth, and ended up fascinated by the way in which the Japanese integrated their Zen beliefs into these arts. The emphasis on everyday crafts and simplicity reminds me very much of the Arts & Crafts Movement in the nineteenth century. In fact, while on the phone with my apprentice tonight, I began speculating on whether Walter Crane incorporated Japanese design into his illustrations, not just because Japanese art was all the rage at the time, but because he was in the Arts & Crafts Movement and saw similarities between that and what the Japanese were trying to achieve.
I don't have an Arts & Crafts house, simply because (1) I've gotten lots of furnishings from my parents, and (2) Doug has different tastes in furnishings than I do. But our wallpaper in the living room is of an Arts & Crafts design, and the bookcases that I bought myself are of a simple design. At the moment, I'm less worried about the particular design of my home's furnishings than I am about the clutter. I need to weed through my belongings this summer.
Later:
Herrigel writes about Zen swordsmanship:
"At the moment of evasion the combatant reaches back to strike, and in a flash the deadly stroke has fallen, sure and irresistible. It is as if the sword wielded itself, and just as we say in archery that 'It' takes aim and hits, so here 'It' takes the place of the ego, availing itself of a facility and a dexterity which the ego only acquires by conscious effort. And here too 'It' is only a name for something which can neither be understood nor laid hold of, and which only reveals itself to those who have experienced it. . . .
"What is true of archery and swordsmanship also applies to all the other [Zen] arts. Thus, mastery in ink-painting is only attained when the hand, exercising perfect control over technique, executes what hovers before the mind's eye at the same moment when the mind begins to form it, without there being a hair's breadth between. Painting then becomes spontaneous calligraphy. Here again the painter's instructions might be: spend ten years observing bamboos, become a bamboo yourself, then forget everything and - paint."
I conclude from the above that I follow a Zen way of writing, at least as far as my initial, inner drafts are concerned. I virtually never consciously think through what I am going to write, as I gather some writers do; the story simply unfolds in front of me, like a motion picture.
The part where I'm un-Zen is in putting the story down on paper. Dialogue and exposition I can do with little or no thought, but description is a painful process of thinking through every single word. That's why it takes me so long to get my stories onto paper; otherwise, I'd be tossing them off for several hours a day.
Unlike Herrigel, I don't have the feeling of my inner drafting process constituting a breakdown between I and Thou - a merging of two bodies into a single body. It feels more as though my Muse and I are waltzing together, cooperating to create art. I suppose that shows how Western I am in my perspective.
Later:
Walter Kaufman has this to say on the topic of Zen, in his Religions in Four Dimensions:
"Many interpreters of Zen have written as if it had brought to the arts of archery and swordsmanship some utterly unheard of and mysterious quality that cannot be disassociated from a peculiar kind of mysticism. . . . But in fact the mystery is no greater - and no less great - than that involved in the bowmanship of a fine cellist or violinist. He does not look at what he is doing and yet hits the strings precisely as he wishes. This takes years of training and considerable discipline, and it may be mysterious, but it is inseparable from professionalism."
*** 4 May 2008
Visited Mother at the rehabilitation hospital, visited the National Building Museum, visited the D.C. public library, went to Evensong, and went grocery shopping. Doug and I agreed that we would count today's expeditions as our daily exercise.
Doug seemed cheered by the day out, which seems reason enough to try it again next Sunday. I don't feel manic tonight; I feel exhausted and ready to return to my regular schedule.
As I might have predicted from a visit to the D.C. public library, I came home with a backpack full of books. However, nearly all of them are on monasticism (Christian and Buddhist), which means I won't have to search for such writings - either offline or online - for the foreseeable future. That cuts out a big source of my current browsing.
The next week or so is going to be unusual inasmuch as my mother's coming home from the hospital and wants my help with some chores at her place. Other than the above and (maybe) my weekly outing with Doug, I'd like to stick at home for the foreseeable future. The next professional event I'm scheduled to attend (a slash fiction convention) isn't till mid-June.
It's odd how much closer I come to the stereotype of a solitary, the longer I do this. It isn't that I'm trying to head in that direction; it's that I realize I can't get things done without cutting back further on certain activities. It's like when I entered into mentoring, thinking I was only going to mentor my apprentice in writing. Yeah, right.
As for going on the Web only once a month, that turned out to be unworkable: it's just impossible for me to stay off the Web that long, because things come up that need to be dealt with. So my new plan is to go on the Internet only one hour per week (which seems to be my upper limit for tolerance before I get manic), on Friday or Saturday. On days when I'm publishing online and therefore have to stay online longer, the rule will be one hour on, one hour off, till I get my tasks done. We'll see if that works.
This all sounds like I'm changing my schedule daily, but in fact, things are beginning to settle into a regular pattern. It's just a matter of pruning or severely limiting the activities that cause the pattern to break.
*** 7 May 2008
C. S. Lewis said in Reflections on the Psalms, "One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian; one might so easily mistake it for being a good Christian."
Similarly, one might easily mistake reading about simplicity for actually living a simple life.
I've realized, far too belatedly, that my simplicity reading for the past month has been following my greedy-grab pattern of me getting so absorbed in a topic that I start grabbing and skimming every book I can on the subject I've become interested in. (You'll be able to see that from the sheer number of titles at the bottom of this post that I've grabbed this month.) This pattern has to stop.
I'm also facing the problem that I have other nonfiction reading to do that isn't getting done. After careful consideration, I set aside ninety minutes a day (I'd really rather it were more like sixty minutes a day) to reading one chapter each of writings in the following subjects: simplicity, authorship, service and protocol, and Victorian and Edwardian history.
I started on this new schedule a couple of days ago. I was more than a little worried that my one-track mind wouldn't be able to cope with so many different readings in one day, but in fact this tactic seems to be working admirably. Knowing that I can only read one chapter of each writing each day, I find myself slowing down to appreciate better what I'm reading.
I just reread all of my simplicity journal entries for the past month, in preparation for posting them on Friday, and I'm very pleased at how much progress I've made during the past month. My progress hasn't yet made a noticeable impact on the quantity of my writing, but I'm much more aware than I was previously of where my problem areas lie, and am much more inclined to tackle them. If anyone had told me a month ago that I would be willing to sacrifice my near-daily visits to the library during warm weather, I would have been incredulous. The fact that this now seems a sensible course of action to take - indeed, a relief - shows how much my mindset has changed in the past month.
RECENT SIMPLICITY READINGS
Thich Nhat Hanh: "Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life."
Nancy Klein Maguire: "An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order."
Dennis Okholm: "Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants."
Peter France: "Hermits."
Kathleen Norris: "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography."
Marcia Ford: "Traditions of the Ancients: Vintage Faith Practices for the 21st Century."
St. Therese of Lisieux: "Story of a Soul."
Jon Kabat-Zin: "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life."
Eve Baker: "Paths in Solitude."
Evelyn Underhill: "The Letters of Evelyn Underhill."
Gary Gach: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism."
Eugen Herrigel: "Zen in the Art of Archery."
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Encarta articles on Zen and Japanese art.
John Michael Talbot: "The Way of the Mystics: Ancient Wisdom for Experiencing God Today."
Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck (editors): "Christians Talk about Buddhist Meditation, Buddhists Talk about Christian Prayer."
Dennis Patrick Slattery: "Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life."
--Richard J. Foster: Freedom of Simplicity.
Topics in this post: Internet addiction, acquisitiveness, Carthusian monks, sacrifice, tidying my surroundings, schedules, skimming quotas, solitaries, rhythm versus novelty, library browsing quotas, travel quotas, Zen Buddhism and the arts, reading quotas, using simplicity as an excuse not to be simple.
*** 7 April 2008
One of my standard days on the Internet - which is to say, not good. Four hours of work done and three hours of unnecessary play. Even those four hours of work I would have liked to have cut back on. The Internet is an endless drain on my energy. I can't help but feel that, if my eyes were worse and it was therefore harder for me to use the Internet, I'd be better able to figure out what was necessary Internet usage and what was frills.
I think, on reflection, that my poor day is an indicator that I haven't made radical enough sacrifices yet. Cutting my Friends pages (i.e. RSS feeds) to the bone two weeks ago was a radical sacrifice for me, and nothing has happened except that my life is better now, because I no longer have as much skimming material to go through. Now that the change is made, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice at all; it feels like a reward.
I look at my flash drive - the one I use to transfer files between my Internet-usage computer and my word-processor-usage computer - and what I see is files. Lots and lots of files, many more than there were when I went online this morning. On my hard drive, the Temporary folder - the one that I use to temporarily store files in until I get a chance to look through those files - is half a gigabyte heavy. All of those files have been accumulated since last September . . . and that doesn't even count the files that I filed away elsewhere on the hard drive without reading. My military history file, for example, is one-an-a-half gigabytes of mainly unread material. That folder I started in December.
So I'm continuing to have a major greedy-grab problem, based on what I can only describe as impulse downloading. When I get interested in a particular topic, or a particular treatment of a topic, I have to have everything I can find on the topic right-now-by-god-or-heads-will-roll. That's what leads to the grabbing. And that's what needs to change.
A lot of the problem is that I grew up in a culture that regards the accumulation of possessions as highly valuable. About the only thing that seems to counteract this childhood training I received (not so much from my parents as from the world around me) is reading about people who strive to live lives of great simplicity and self-discipline. I just wish I was in contact with some of these folks. (Well, okay, I do know some authors who are far more self-disciplined than I in the writing department.)
I did post three messages - in threads I'd originally read offline - at Hermit's Slate. We'll see whether my posts draw any responses.
Meanwhile, I see that Into Great Silence is out on DVD in the United States. Acquisitive me wants it. I've been reading reviews of it for months. Here's its trailer, and here's its blurb:
"Nestled deep in the postcard-perfect French Alps, the Grande Chartreuse is considered one of the world's most ascetic monasteries. In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready. Gröning, sans crew or artificial lighting, lived in the monks' quarters for six months - filming their daily prayers, tasks, rituals and rare outdoor excursions."
Other than the singing of prayers by the monks at periodic intervals, the film has no soundtrack; it also has almost no dialogue in its three hours. It wowed audiences in Europe.
*** 10 April 2008
I've managed to get myself back on a steady edit-and-publish schedule, which is good, because I have lots of work to do in preparing Blood Vow for publication. I'm gradually adding exercise and fiction-reading back into the mix, the latter in case my Muse decides to show up. He has a tendency to appear at the most awkward moments, when I'm not ready for him.
Considering that I got myself off the Internet only two days ago, I think things are going well. I continue to face temptations to go back online, but I know that those will fade, the longer I'm offline.
*** 11 April 2008
Matters continue to proceed well; I've written fiction for the past two days. I'm determined not to go on the Web till I get "Blood Vow" ready for layout, or till the end of the month, whichever comes first. I'm allowing myself to pick up e-mail in the meantime, but the longer I'm off the Web, the lesser the Web's hold will be on me when I come back online to do necessary work.
*** 13 April 2008
I read the blog entries on my Friends pages, and they were about writing, publishing, writing, writing, prehistoric animals (okay, I can always expect something like that on Maureen Lycaon's journal), writing, publishing . . .
I wanted to scream, "Where are the blog entries on simplicity?"
Actually, there was one. A friend started up a community called crankysavers, for folks who want to feel good about not spending money. But I really wish that the list of blogs I regularly read reflected my simplicity interests in some manner.
Later:
While reading a news article about modern Catholic hermits, I was struck by this paragraph:
"It takes time to get past the loneliness to the realizations and insights that come from prolonged exposure to silence and solitude, according to Paul Fredette. 'We're not talking here about the hush between television commercials or the quiet within the car when stuck in traffic. It has to be done for a prolonged amount of time. It takes at least a couple of weeks of exposure to begin to really be nourished by silence and solitude.'"
Yes. The longer I'm offline, the more I feel that nourishment. I haven't yet achieved my goal of going on the Web only once a month, but I did only go on the Web once last week, which is a small start. And today I was on the Web for three hours rather than my usual six to twelve hours. I think it'll be much easier, as a result, to return my normal schedule, and I'm also having a better sense of what triggers me into spending time on the Web.
So, though I'm not happy that I broke my resolve and went on the Web earlier than I'd intended, I still feel as though I'm making progress.
*** 15 April 2008
I fall, I fall, and yet again I fell. But every time I fall once more into my Internet addiction, I realize that I need to make deeper sacrifices to achieve greater self-discipline, and so I gain something - a silver lining to a dark cloud.
*** 16 April 2008
On our way to visit my mother in the hospital, Doug and I stopped at Washington Cathedral. He spent ninety minutes exploring the cathedral. I spent ninety minutes exploring the cathedral bookstore.
I'd hoped to find a bookcase or two that related to monasticism and eremitism in some manner. In fact, I found six bookcases' worth of books on the spiritual life - most of which related to monasticism in some way - as well as a bookcase dvoted to the Benedictines and the Desert Fathers and Mothers. I was in heaven. (The Desert Fathers and Mothers, for those of you don't know, were the first Christian hermits.)
There was also a book on the shelf with a title that was something along the lines of The Sin of Living Cautiously. I didn't spend much time looking at it, but its title encapsulated my thinking overnight.
Up till now, I've been approaching the process of simplification as "business as usual except for one or two sacrifices." My approach has been opt-out: If I didn't happen to notice that something was a problem in my life, I'd keep it. And even if I noticed that something was a problem, I've tended to chip away at it bit by bit, rather than tackling it whole, for fear that I'd discard something valuable.
But what if I were to take an opt-in approach instead? What if I were to assume that everything is a potential barrier to my goal of living in simplicity? What if I required every activity to prove itself harmless (either for regular use or for occasional use) before I allowed it into my life?
What a scary idea. But this whole-hearted approach could prove to be less wearisome than my trying to gradually chip away at a mountain's worth of activities.
I know that the activities I do when I'm in my writing mode don't harm me; nor am I harmed by reading writings related to simplicity - in proper quantities, in both cases. These are all activities that I know I can do regularly. Any activity beyond that I'm going to test until I'm certain that it's harmless to me. Here are the questions I want to answer:
1) Is this activity really necessary and/or specially enjoyable?
2) If so, can I practice this activity regularly without my becoming manic or otherwise straying from my schedule of simplicity?
3) If not, can I practice this activity occasionally rather than regularly? (If not, skip to Question #5.)
4) If so, can I practice this activity occasionally without my becoming manic or otherwise straying from my schedule of simplicity?
5) If not, is there a similar activity that would achieve the same ends?
6) If not, is there a way in which I can practice the activity differently so that it won't cause problems?
7) If not, is the activity inherently harmful to me, or is it becoming so through some other activity (or lack of activity) in my life?
I'm up to Question #7 as far as my Internet usage is concerned. :/ I suspect that I've answered Question #4 in the affirmative for watching full-length films/shows and for a handful of other leisure activities, but I don't want to rush to any conclusions till I've had time to detox from the Internet. As Paul Fredette put it: "It takes at least a couple of weeks of exposure to begin to really be nourished by silence and solitude."
Incidentally, the task "Tidy my surroundings and sort contents of boxes" is on my list of activities to test because, the moment I began thinking of my life in very simple terms, I realized that my surroundings are messy. Not as messy as they would have been up till a couple of years ago (when I began to get into the habit of cleaning up after myself occasionally - O strange new world), but it's still not the starkly simple cell that I would prefer to have.
(By the way, as a prisonfic writer, I find it delightful that prisons and hermitages use the same vocabulary for dwellings.)
So I'm going to tidy the floors and the furniture surfaces in the rooms that I use, shove everything into closets that I'm not currently using, then take everything out, one box at a time, and figure out which items I want to use, store, or dump, as I was beginning to do over the winter.
At any rate, I hope my list of current activities isn't too long. If I make the list too short, I'm afraid that I'll break it within a short time. I've already dealt with my usual problem of my inner tempter deciding that I should do whatever I've forbidden myself from doing; I woke up from my afternoon nap with an urge to put together the next issue of True Tales. My tempter was even kind enough to supply me with an editorial to write.
I jotted down an outline of the editorial in case I should decide to write it later, and then told my tempter to take a hike.
*** 18 April 2008
Not the best start to my experiment, although - with one exception, which I'll mention later - I kept to my list of acceptable activities.
Here's what I did today:
Talked to my mother on the phone. (I had lots of scattered conversations with Doug throughout the day, which I won't bother to note here.)
Ate while reading Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order.
Walked up to the Center (i.e. the town center), listening to a novel on my MP3 player as I did so.
Browsed through the public library, only allowing myself to take out one book of fiction and one book of nonfiction. (This is truly remarkable, given my usual borrowing habits.)
Stopped at the grocery store briefly to pick up needed items.
Sat in the Center, eating an ice cream bar and reading the Washington City Paper. This was where I slipped. Not with the ice cream bar, but with the City Paper; skimming through nonfiction isn't on my list of acceptable activities at the moment. I ended up spending forty-five minutes reading.
Walked back from the Center, listening to the novel as I did so.
Ate while dipping into the two books I had checked out from the library. The novel turned out to be boring; the nonfiction book was Dennis Okholm's Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants. By this point of the day, I should have been reading only fiction, as I'm duty-bound to read at least two hours of fiction each day.
Took a nap.
Woke up and read more of Monk Habits for Everyday People while eating. By this point of the day, I should reallyhave been reading fiction. I should also have been editing and proofreading.
Felt sleepy and restless. Usually when this happens, I call my apprentice - conversations with him always perk me up - but he was away at his debate society tonight, so I looked through my list of acceptable activities for a task that would awaken me. I ended up answering personal correspondence. For two-and-a-half hours. And I was argumentative in my letters, as I so often am in personal correspondence. (Reforming my letter-writing habits is one of my goals.)
Now it's bedtime, and I've gotten next to zero work done today. (I did get my daily quota of exercise done, though, which is very good.) Tomorrow I have to go to the Center again - I forgot to buy milk today - but I'm hoping that I can undertake that task better tomorrow.
*** 18 April 2008
I did. The first part of my day was basically the same as yesterday, but with the chaff discarded. I returned a call from my mother, ate breakfast while reading An Infinity of Little Hours, proofread Blood Vow, called my apprentice, picked a print novel from my collection of books, walked up to the Center while listening to my audio novel, briefly shopped for groceries, ate lunch at the Center while reading the print novel, walked home while listening to the audio novel, and took a nap. In other words, I only did activities that really needed to be done: communicated with my family (my apprentice is family), read about simplicity, proofread, exercised, read fiction, and did household tasks (grocery shopping).
I picked up the ingredients for pea soup while at the store. I think I'll make the soup now while listening to the audio novel; then I'll do more proofreading, edit a chapter of Lawnmowers, and, if I still have time, write to a friend. That will be a very full and profitable day.
If I haven't made it clear before, the foundation blocks of my professional life are reading fiction and exercising. If I do these two things regularly, my Muse produces. If I don't, he shuts down. So that's why I'm putting such strong emphasis in my schedule on those two activities. Editing, proofreading, and layout are also important activities in my professional life this month.
The trick is trying to keep my professional life going at the same time I'm trying to keep focussed on achieving a life of simplicity. It's a hard balancing act, but I know that, the moment simplification disappears from my life, so does my ability to do professional work.
*** 19 April 2008
Hurrah. An Internet session where I did exactly what I intended to do.
I went online, collected my e-mail, collected my Friends pages, checked a potential problem at my blog, renewed a couple of domains that needed to be renewed before the end of the month . . . and that was it. When I began to be tempted to surf for articles on monasticism and eremitism, I told myself firmly, "No," went offline, and browsed through the massive amounts of unread e-mail I have on my hard drive till I found old posts from the e-mail lists Catholic Hermits and Monastic Life.
Total time spent online: Less than an hour. I don't feel manic.
Later:
Now I do.
My post-Internet experience - reading lots of posts from e-mail lists - helped me to pinpoint a cause of my mania: skimming. I'm currently reading two self-publishing lists, but I'm going to stop doing so. Any big news in the self-publishing world will reach me through the blogs.
I'd suspected for a long while now that skimming was problematic for me, since it's one of the things I haven't done during the periods when my life is blissfully simple, but I hadn't realized before skimming was that problematic: enough to make me manic in the space of a single hour. So now I have to figure out how to minimize skimming in my life. That will be a massive job, given how much skimming I've been accustomed to doing.
And oh dear, library browsing counts as skimming, doesn't it? So do lots of other little things, like glancing at the local paper and sorting through my e-mail. And of course Web surfing does, always. I think I'll have to start by giving myself daily and weekly skimming quotas.
Later:
Okay, I've given myself an offline skimming quota. And while I'm at it, I've given myself a quota for weekly online time. I can't believe I haven't done that before now.
I'm pleased that, after only four days of trying out this new opt-in method, I've already managed to identify one of the contaminants in my life.
*** 20 April 2008
I've added editing, proofreading, and layout to my list of tasks I can do without breaking from my regular schedule.
I'm continuing to read An Infinity of Little Hours. All of my warning alarms as a journalist went off when Nancy Klein Maguire wrote in the introduction, "I have included nothing that could not have happened, but I have not bound myself to reproducing an exact chronology." Indeed, it becomes obvious within a few chapters that Ms. Maguire is of the Randy Shilts school of narrative nonfiction, inventing episodes to serve as dramatic backdrops to thought processes that she presumably learned about from interviews, letters, etc. I say "presumably" because the big drawback of this type of semi-fictional narrative is that the reader is left without any certainty as to which parts of the book actually happened and which were invented. I'm as big a fan of narrative nonfiction as anyone - it's the type of journalism I usually do myself - but I would have preferred a close adherence to the actual events, even at the expense of rich drama.
That's the drawback of the book, but the narrative is compelling, and the book offers lots of information about Carthusian life that I'd never known before.
*** 24 April 2008
I can't quite put my finger on what's bothering me about An Infinity of Little Hours. All I can say is that, every time I finish reading a chapter, I ended up feeling as though I'm pathological for enjoying simplicity and structure.
Even though Ms. Maguire has one of the novices refer to the "intoxicating solitude," she seems to be more aware of the negative aspects of Carthusian life than the positive aspects. Maybe that's because she's drawing mainly on the memories of ex-monks. I suppose that a description of the military that was based primarily on the memories of men who had quit the military would similarly have a negative tinge.
Certainly there are negative things about monastic life, both things that monks are aware of and things that they aren't. (The chapter about Carthusian sexuality was particularly sad to read.) And this book is a refreshing contrast to the many white-washed descriptions of monastic life.
But when I read the writings of people who enjoy the contemplative life, I get a much richer sense than I'm getting from Ms. Maguire's book of why the contemplative life can be enjoyable. Quite often, when Ms. Maguire describes someone's enjoyment of Carthusian life, she does so in terms that suggest to me that she faintly disapproves of the enjoyment. Here's the type of passage I mean:
"Chuck adapted to the Charterhouse so well that he was almost invisible. He had what he had always wanted - rules that told him exactly what to do. He did not have to make decisions; he didn't have to assert himself."
No sense there of structure and submission as a glorious enterprise, worthy of high praise (if done correctly, with the right participants). Perhaps I'm reading too much into the passage, but I get the feeling that the author believes that Chuck opted for the easy way rather than taking the better, more difficult road.
*** 25 April 2008
I've been keeping (more or less) to my half-hour-per-day skimming quota this week. I found myself reading more slowly and carefully tonight than I've done in a long time. I suspect that the second activity is due to the first.
I'm beginning to think that my vow of simplicity is likely to turn out to be "No skimming." Or at least, as little skimming as possible - the skimming equivalent of voluntary poverty. It's becoming quite clear to me that the activities which cause me to lose focus are all, in some manner or another, skimming activities: skimming writings, browsing the Web, watching videos, conversing with people I don't know well, travelling to places I don't often visit . . . My danger spots are things that I'm likely to skim quickly over, either because they contain a lot of boring material or because they require rapid-fire thinking/reading from me. Anything that's dull, quick, or relatively unfamiliar to me triggers my skimming instinct.
The activities that I can focus closely on are familiar activities, done daily or weekly, that are interesting enough to keep my whole attention or that require me to concentrate by virtue of how they're presented (for example, reading in braille, which I don't do well enough to be able to skim).
My acquisitive tendency is a separate but related problem: the more acquiring I do, the greater my tendency to skim in order to acquire more.
My new custom of walking while listening to text-to-speech audio books is working out so far, though it's still unfamiliar enough that I can't fully concentrate on the books. In light of what I wrote above, I'm going to slow down the text-to-speech (which I can do). I already have the software set to record the text to play slower than average, because I've always had difficulty processing information that arrives by ear (I'm fairly sure that I have audio processing disorder), but the text still isn't slow enough, I think.
*** 26 April 2008
Well, I can't say that today was exactly a triumph against my Internet addiction, but I made a small amount of progress.
I've had the problem that, when I go online, I want to check my e-mail while I'm online to see whether there are any letters that need to be urgently responded to before I go offline for another week. Checking my e-mail while online feeds my addiction, for various reasons.
So today I downloaded my e-mail, read it offline, wrote replies offline, came back online, sent off my e-mail, and did Web work.
Something I learned: Not to try to do personal correspondence this way. I'm better off reading and responding to personal e-mail gradually over a week's time.
However, this method of writing e-mail offline did keep me from sending off a post I composed to one of the self-publishing lists. The post was totally unnecessary, and would have kept me hooked to reading that list rather than going to "no mail" on it. If I'd been responding online, I would have realized this after I sent the post.
Other than that, it was another typical Internet visit - too long, too much time wasted on non-necessities - but I feel better today than I did last week after visiting the Internet, probably because I know that I'm firmly committed to staying offline till at least next Saturday.
One online goodie I do feel pleased at discovering:
solitarybird_lj, the blog of an Episcopalian hermit. And not just any Episcopalian hermit, but one whom I'd read about recently in New York Magazine. I'm enjoying reading through her blog entries, which I downloaded.Oh, and I also kept within the three-and-a-half-hours-weekly online limit I'd set for myself.
Later:
I totted up my weekly totals. Overall, a good week, though I didn't reach my ideal hours in any of my writing-related categories. Also, my hours for exercise remain high, and I managed to cut down the number of hours on leisure activities and blog-entry writing, which is good.
What concerns me is that it took me three days to recover from my last Internet addiction spell, and I'd no sooner gotten myself back onto a regular writing schedule than I went online again. I really need to get myself onto a schedule of only going online twice a month. Especially since I'm running over my deadline of getting my next e-book out.
So I've set that as my next goal: Not to go online till May 11. By then, I should have my e-book, audio book, and booktrailer ready to publish. If I manage to stay offline, that will be a new triumph, because the longest number of straight days that I've managed to stay offline during the last few years has been ten days (last December).
*** 27 April 2008
I've finished reading the blog of
solitarybird_lj, and my goodness, it's a treasure. I recommend it, from beginning to end, to anyone who's interested in the lives of hermits, or in related topics.Here are excerpts from a couple of entries I especially liked:
Even in silence and solitude I am having trouble disciplining my thoughts. Sometimes Morning Prayer goes like this...
"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name..."
I want a cheeseburger.
"Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth..."
A paw pats my leg insistently. Jeoffrey, who has not taken a vow of silence, meows; he wants a cheeseburger too. . . .
Save us from the time of trial.
6:30 a.m. Loud purring wakes me. The cat has taken on the role of hermitage alarm clock. Opening one eye, I see him staring, and can imagine him saying, "Benedicite!" in good monastic fashion. Sending a sleepy thought heavenward, I mutter, "Deo gratias..." then begin to drift back to sleep. This earns me a pat on the face from an impatient paw.
A day in the life.
That second entry inspired me to record my own activities on this blog tomorrow. If nothing else, doing so should help keep me on track.
Concerning the Internet: After thinking it over, I've concluded that trying to read my e-mail before I go on the Web is not such a hot idea after all; it merely adds to my mania. And what's my big hurry in answering e-mail? Ninety-nine percent of the time, the world won't end if someone has to wait a week to hear back from me.
So I'm going to try to just download my e-mail next time and then gradually read it offline over the next week or two. That will give me greater armor to tackle my Web activities . . . which are major next time. Even though I can do the list announcements offline (thank goodness), I still will have to upload nearly my entire domain, upload my e-book editions to Lulu and Amazon, post my blog entries, announce my Website updates / e-book to my blogs and MySpace profiles and about two zillion comms/asylums/lists, not to mention having to send off review requests. . . .
It's going to be a nightmare. I'm hoping that staying offline for a fortnight will give me at least a bit more preparation than I've had in the past for this sort of exercise.
*** 28 April 2008
Below, my day. This isn't a typical day. This is an ideal day - the way I'd like, more or less, nearly all my days to go.
2:20-3:05 PM - Simplicity: Meditation on a manuscript.
Yes, I'm up late. I usually sleep from midnight to noon in the winter; now that the weather is warm, I'm trying to get myself up in the morning, but for some reason I overslept today.
I'm scheduled, upon waking, to write fiction and edit what I've written. However, I'm still in recovery from Saturday's Internet spell, so that's out of the question today. Instead, I did an old practice: meditating on a manuscript. I won't record the full process here (it's based on the medieval squires' Vigil of Arms and the iconographers' traditional vigil before an icon they've created), but essentially it's a way to get myself in the proper mood - respectful of the duty I'm to undertake - to do a final edit on manuscript - Lawnmowers, in this case.
3:05-4:00 - Read fiction: Read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Other Wind while eating vegetarian pea soup, whole wheat bread, and juice.
Reading fiction, along with exercise, is the foundation of my day. I usually do it while eating.
4:00-4:10 - Leisure: Read a picture book: Ludwig Bemelman's Madeleine.
Just a brief break for fun. I'm in the process of rereading all the picture books I own, which will take me months.
4:10-5:10 - Read fiction / do household tasks / exercise: Unload the dishwasher, hang up clothes, clean the bedroom floor, and tidy my desk while listening to Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills.
A classic case of me combining a bunch of activities at once.
5:10-5:40 - Friends/family: Talk with my apprentice on the phone.
He was feeling depressed, his car having unexpectedly broken down, with a resulting bill so large that he can't afford to visit me this summer. I did my best to cheer him up.
5:40-6:45 - Edit fiction: Edit "Lawnmowers" while drinking hot chocolate tea.
You read that right. It's my own special mixture: herbal tea (black cherry in this case, though I'm strangely fond of hot chocolate chamomile tea) steeped in hot milk, and then mixed with one tablespoon each of cocoa and malt Ovaltine. It tastes like flavored hot chocolate, but it's cheaper, less sugary, and fat-free.
Oh, and I'm now two-thirds of the way through editing Lawnmowers.
6:45-7:20 - Publish fiction: Lay out domain while listening to the Beatles.
Web layout is dessert for me. It's what I do when I'm tired of doing harder stuff.
7:20-7:40 - Family/friends: Talk to my mother on the phone, and then look up and discuss with Doug the meaning of the Ancient Greek word luô ("loose"), which appears in Matthew 18:18.
My mother is in rehabilitation from an operation, so I've been calling her daily.
Doug is listening to a video lecture on Luther right now. Upon my consulting the Liddell-Scott Greek Lexicon (trivia moment: the Liddell in question was the father to Alice Liddell of Alice in Wonderland fame), we discovered that luô originally meant loose, and then was applied to loosing prisoners, and eventually ended up (in Euripides) meaning "atone." All those layers of meaning appear in the Matthew passage. I love Greek.
7:40-8:10 - Read fiction: Read The Other Wind while eating natural peanut butter and banana slices on whole wheat toast, cream cheese and pear slices on whole wheat toast, and milk.
I'm awkwardly in transition from my winter schedule to my summer schedule, which is why today, oddly enough, I have only two meals.
8:10-8:30 - Simplicity: Read Angela Zito's interview with Philip Gröning, director of Into Great Silence, the film about Carthusian monks.
Much needed, because I'm feeling frazzled by this point. Gröning turns out to be that rare treasure: an artist whose thoughts on his creations are deep. Most of us are better at creating than at talking about what we've created. (I've been discovering that this month as I try, without much success, to articulate to a correspondent some of the things I said in Twenty Thousand Gold Stars in a much better way.)
By contrast, here are some juicy quotes from Gröning:
"I had an accident on the shoot. I fell off a cliff wall, 18 feet down, vertically onto a patch of gravel, and I thought I was dead but I wasn't. There were 40 seconds - I studied medicine and lying there, I had no pain, and I thought, OK 18 foot cliff, vertical fall, no pain. You broke your neck, you have 45 seconds and it's going to go dark, another 50 seconds and it's going to go silent. So I was looking up and thinking, everything is so beautiful. Then once it was clear that I could move, I started thinking about a broken cable on the camera. And then I had a total breakdown and started to cry, because I was so overwhelmed by having lived, and on the other hand, by how quickly I was willing to go back into efficiency. What are we really doing with this obsession with efficiency, what are we doing with our lives?"
"Repetition, on a personal level, is the deeper way of understanding. Learning something new every day is not getting you very far. Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it's in the film - the monks' life is repetition. It's a different approach. . . . you say to yourself, I'll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time. Which is maybe broadening your horizon, but lessening your touch."
"The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don't have problems with it, it's not your religion."
8:30-9:55 - Journal: Write Life of Simplicity entry while listening to choir music.
What I'm doing now. I want to get up earlier tomorrow, so after I finish up the next couple of tasks, I'll go to bed.
9:55-10:05 - Simplicity: Add up total hours for the day while listening to choir music.
Given my eclectic tastes in music, I might be listening to anything, but I tend to listen to quieter music at night, as a way to wind down. (Mind you, a cathedral congregation singing at the top of its lungs can be anything but quiet.)
Here are the total times for today, which doesn't include preparation time or brushing teeth or other little stuff like that. The time in parentheses are my approximate goals for the daily times for each activity.
Write fiction - 0 (minimum of :45).
Edit fiction - :40 (minimum of 1:00).
Read fiction - 1:35 (minimum of 2:00).
Publish fiction - :30 (minimum of 1:00).
Exercise - :40 (minimum of :45).
Household tasks - :40 (minimum of :30).
Family/friends - :45 (no more than 1:00).
Simplicity - :45 (no more than 1:00).
Journal - 1:15 (no more than :45).
Leisure - :05 (no more than :30).
Overall, a good day. I would have gotten more done, obviously, if I hadn't decided to go to bed early.
10:05-11:05 - Journal: Finish this entry, rewrite it, shower, and go to bed.
*** 29 April 2008
Rereading the above entry, I'm wondering whether anyone can really grasp the significance of my schedule. Except for the meditation on the manuscript, it probably looks like any writer's average workday (other than me doing a lot less work than the average full-time writer. Curse my need for twelve hours of sleep).
To explain why the schedule has a higher significance, I'm going to go back to what Gröning said:
"Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it's in the film - the monks' life is repetition. It's a different approach. . . . you say to yourself, I'll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time."
Actually, the word I would have used is not repetition but rhythm. Screwtape (the fictional devil invented by C. S. Lewis) talks about the value of rhythm in The Screwtape Letters:
"The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He had made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast."
Exactly; that's the power of rhythm. But then Screwtape goes on to talk about how this desire for rhythm can be twisted:
"Now just as we [devils] pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity or snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.
"This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire." [A pause as I look at my gigantic bookmarks list and nod mournfully.] "The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of dimining returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both." [A pause as I look at my giant book collection and sigh.] "And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure . . ."
Enough; he might as well be writing the story of my life.
At any rate, that's why my schedule is playing a pivotal role in allowing me to regain control of my life. Instead of focussing my schedule on novelty - that is, on obtaining new things all the time - I'm focussing my schedule instead on rhythm: doing the same activities over and over in a particular order, but with a content that varies slightly each day. Write fiction, edit fiction, read simplicity writings, read fiction, exercise / do household tasks, write/edit/publish fiction . . . There's plenty of scope there for variety, even without taking into consideration my occasional breaks for leisure activities, such as library browsing. Yet the solidity of permanence that underlies my schedule gives me an anchor that keeps from flying off on the wind of every whim as though I were a kite without a string.
This is all very different from my greedy-grap approach in the Internet world, where I'm forever searching for new things, and where I'm annoyed if I don't end up with tons of new exciting discoveries after each Internet jaunt. That sort of "Must . . . have . . . novelty" approach to life is exactly what I am trying to get away from. Small changes within the scope of rhythm: that's what I'm striving for. And that's why a day like yesterday is so very much more satisfying to me than spending nine hours on the Internet, downloading dozens of texts and videos.
More satisfying but less seductive, which is why the Internet remains a danger for me.
*** 30 April 2008
Today, the first words I read (from Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) were as follows:
Peter Levi says in The Frontiers of Paradise that monks "become like good children playing at being good." Children, of course, love to make up rules and follow them, to continually say, "as if." Monks are behaving "as if" constancy were possible in this world, and as Levi observes, "at any visitor's first entry into a monastery, time seems to stand still." He adds that "this new time-scale . . . has nothing to do with death and eternity, but involves a tranquil, unhurried, absolutely dominating rhythm" and concludes - correctly, I believe - that this liturgical "sense of time is the greatest difference between monastic life and any other."
This is an outsider's perspective, of course. Monks tell me that this seemingly peaceful life can become hectic for them. But their ability to maintain a schedule, centered on the liturgy, does set them apart from the rest of us and, over the years, submission to liturgical time can develop a playful patience that is very much at odds with worldly values.
* * *
Eerie, because I'd woken up thinking about time and patience. Specifically, I'd been looking at my schedule for the month and facing once more the reality that going on the Web destroys my schedule.
Here's what my last two months look like, in terms of writing and online usage:
MARCH
1: Went online.
2: --
3: --
4: Went online.
5: Went online.
6: Went online.
7: Went online. Wrote fiction.
8: Went online. Wrote fiction.
9: Wrote fiction.
10: Wrote fiction.
11: Wrote fiction, then went online for seven hours.
12: --
13: Went online.
14: Went online.
15: Went online.
16: Went online.
17: Went online.
18: --
19: Went online.
20: Went online.
21: Went online.
22: Went online.
23: Went online.
24: --
25: --
26: --
27: --
28: --
29: Wrote fiction.
30: Wrote fiction.
31: Wrote fiction.
APRIL
1: Wrote fiction.
2: Wrote fiction, then went online for six hours.
3: Went online.
4: --
5: --
6: --
7: Went online.
8: --
9: --
10: Wrote fiction.
11: Wrote fiction.
12: Wrote fiction.
13: Wrote fiction, then went online for three hours.
14: --
15: Went online.
16: --
17: --
18: --
19: Went online.
20: --
21: --
22: Wrote fiction.
23: Wrote fiction.
24: Wrote fiction.
25: Wrote fiction.
26: Went online for three hours.
27: --
28: --
29: Wrote fiction.
First of all, I'm pleased by the fact that my Internet usage has gone down from sixteen days in March to six days in April. (Prior to December, when I deliberately adopted a simple life, my Internet usage was every day of the month, for several years running.) But as you can see, for the most part, I continue to follow my old rule that, if I go on the Web, it takes me at least three days to recover before I can write fiction again. That April 26 was a carefully scheduled visit to the Web made no difference. It still broke my pattern of daily fiction-writing.
That being the case, I'd like to see whether I can switch my Internet usage to the pattern of surfing the Web only once a month, but picking up my e-mail and Friends pages weekly. I don't know whether I can manage this; every now and then I'll have some research problem that can only be resolved by a Web search. Nor am I sure to what extent e-mail contributes to the problem. But I'd like to see whether this new type of schedule will help to resolve the problem of my daily custom of fiction-writing smashing to pieces every time I go on the Web.
Meanwhile, I'm making a good deal of progress in my problem of uncontrollable browsing offline. I was at the public library today for my new schedule of a once-weekly visit, and I was glancing through the new nonfiction books. I had my eye on a popular history book about the early 1900s, the sort of book that I would end up skimming. I found myself thinking, "I can only take out one nonfiction book during this visit, and I'm only allowed thirty minutes of skimming time per day. Is this book really worth taking out?" And the answer was, "No, of course not. I have much more valuable primary sources from the early 1900s on my hard drive that I haven't read yet."
I ended up checking out Marcia Ford's Traditions of the Ancients: Vintage Faith Practices for the 21st Century, which quotes liberally from the Desert Fathers. For the one fiction book I allow myself to check out weekly, I chose Diana Gabaldon's second Lord John novel, which I haven't read yet. No need to check out CDs; I still have some on hand from last week. Total time spent at the library: one hour.
Contrast this with my previous pattern of library borrowing, which would have been to spend hours at the library, bringing home a backpack full of books that I mainly skimmed or set aside without reading before heading back to the library within a day or two. My total skimming time would have been enormous, and I wouldn't have spent much time with books I really, really wanted to read.
Later:
Well, that trip to the library wasn't as innocuous as I'd thought. I ended up spending the rest of the day skimming writings.
I don't think the library trip was the only thing at fault. I'd gotten myself into one of my "must have information right away" moods that sent me sailing through a lot of books in search of information that I really didn't need away. I need to watch out for that.
One of the bits of information I found that I didn't need right away but is nonetheless interesting is that the Buddhist practice of mindfulness has a Christian parallel: memoria. Apparently that's what St. Benedict is referring to in his first degree of humility, though his way of phrasing it is rather negative ("Don't forget about the hell-fire!").
I'm rather worried about my planned trip to D.C. on Sunday. Will it send me off on another skimming spree? I'd really like to see the David Macaulay exhibit while it's still at the National Building Museum (the exhibit ends on Sunday), and I'd like to see my father, whom I've only seen once since Christmas. And - *cough, cough* - I'd like to visit the main branch of the D.C. library.
I think the reason it becomes difficult for me to practice simplicity whenever I leave the house is that, quite simply, my life becomes complicated then. I have much more sensory input, more decisions to make, more things to distract me. I can't fully concentrate on anything, because things are coming at me too quickly and in great quantities. In other words, I'm placed in a "must skim" environment.
When I go online, the situation is much the same.
I'm stealing the passage below from
solitarybird_lj, though I've read it before. It's an excerpt from a very brief monastic rule given by St. Romauld to the Camaldolese hermit-monks in the eleventh century. The more that I attempt a simple life, the more seriously I take this piece of advice.Sit in your cell as in paradise.
Put the whole world behind you and forget it.
Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. . . .
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting,
content with the grace of God,
like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing
but what his mother brings him.
The full rule.
*** 1 May 2008
I'm still trying to decide about whether to go into D.C. on Sunday. My father won't be home on Sunday - he and my stepmother are going to Western New York to do research - so I don't have him as an excuse to justify my trip.
I've been looking at the last few months of my schedule charts, which are color-coded: a red star on the days I write fiction, a green star on the days I read fiction for at least two hours, a silver star on the days I exercise for at least forty-five minutes.
The three colors tend to cluster together. It's hard to determine cause and effect from the charts alone, but I know that, on the days I don't exercise, I find it hard to sleep and can't concentrate the next day. And I know that, when I read a lot of fiction, I tend to end up writing fiction.
The only things that remains absolutely clear is that my going on the Web results in the loss of red stars.
*** 2 May 2008
I've had what I have to call a library addiction fall: I went to the library for the second time this week and brought home half a dozen books.
I'm increasingly feeling that, as a beginner to this life of simplicity, I need to set a routine and stick to it, as far as I can. I'd like to stay at home as much as possible this year, confining my expeditions out of the house to a once-weekly visit to the Center (the library and grocery store) and a daily walk around the lake that's across the street from me. Whether I should have a once-a-week sabbath from my work, going out of of town with Doug, is something I'm still uncertain about. This Sunday I'll definitely be going into D.C., since my mother has told me she needs clothes delivered to the rehabilitation hospital she's at. We'll see how that goes.
On a separate topic: I've started rereading The Letters of Evelyn Underhill as one of my simplicity readings, only to discover that the first third of the collected letters are pre-WWI. How delightful to be able to do writing research at the same time I'm doing simplicity readings, and the letters are just plain fun to read. They're permeated with charity in the good sense of the word - Underhill is forever phrasing herself in the kindest possible manner to correspondents who (I gather from reading between the lines) are rather querulous. I'm taking mental notes, because, while my correspondents make for much easier reading than hers must have, my own correspondence style could do with a great deal of improvement.
Later:
All right, I've reworked my schedule, leaving open the possibility of a daily out-of-town visit, and am permitting for now a weekly library visit, though if I keep going on these library binges, I'll have to rethink that. Other than that and obligations to family and friends (I need to visit my mother daily next week when she comes home from the hospital, for example), I've given myself a set schedule for each day. It's the same schedule I've been trying to follow recently - and have been succeeding in certain respects, for example in the daily walk - but I'm going to attempt to keep fixed upon it from now on. We'll see how matters go tomorrow. I really need to get myself back on track, because my hourly totals for work this week are going to be abysmal.
Later:
Among the books I picked up at the library today was Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery, which has some interesting suggestions on the connection between art and meditation. I'd expected the book to be rather esoteric, insofar as I'm not well enough couched in Eastern worldviews to fully understand books on Eastern belief systems. However, so far, one of its main messages - if you produce art, you have to concentrate on what you're doing, not on the fact that you're producing art - just seems to me to be common sense. If a centipede thinks about his feet when he's walking, he'll trip.
I came home and looked up encyclopedia articles on Japanese arts such as gardening, flower arrangements, tea ceremonies, martial arts, and so forth, and ended up fascinated by the way in which the Japanese integrated their Zen beliefs into these arts. The emphasis on everyday crafts and simplicity reminds me very much of the Arts & Crafts Movement in the nineteenth century. In fact, while on the phone with my apprentice tonight, I began speculating on whether Walter Crane incorporated Japanese design into his illustrations, not just because Japanese art was all the rage at the time, but because he was in the Arts & Crafts Movement and saw similarities between that and what the Japanese were trying to achieve.
I don't have an Arts & Crafts house, simply because (1) I've gotten lots of furnishings from my parents, and (2) Doug has different tastes in furnishings than I do. But our wallpaper in the living room is of an Arts & Crafts design, and the bookcases that I bought myself are of a simple design. At the moment, I'm less worried about the particular design of my home's furnishings than I am about the clutter. I need to weed through my belongings this summer.
Later:
Herrigel writes about Zen swordsmanship:
"At the moment of evasion the combatant reaches back to strike, and in a flash the deadly stroke has fallen, sure and irresistible. It is as if the sword wielded itself, and just as we say in archery that 'It' takes aim and hits, so here 'It' takes the place of the ego, availing itself of a facility and a dexterity which the ego only acquires by conscious effort. And here too 'It' is only a name for something which can neither be understood nor laid hold of, and which only reveals itself to those who have experienced it. . . .
"What is true of archery and swordsmanship also applies to all the other [Zen] arts. Thus, mastery in ink-painting is only attained when the hand, exercising perfect control over technique, executes what hovers before the mind's eye at the same moment when the mind begins to form it, without there being a hair's breadth between. Painting then becomes spontaneous calligraphy. Here again the painter's instructions might be: spend ten years observing bamboos, become a bamboo yourself, then forget everything and - paint."
I conclude from the above that I follow a Zen way of writing, at least as far as my initial, inner drafts are concerned. I virtually never consciously think through what I am going to write, as I gather some writers do; the story simply unfolds in front of me, like a motion picture.
The part where I'm un-Zen is in putting the story down on paper. Dialogue and exposition I can do with little or no thought, but description is a painful process of thinking through every single word. That's why it takes me so long to get my stories onto paper; otherwise, I'd be tossing them off for several hours a day.
Unlike Herrigel, I don't have the feeling of my inner drafting process constituting a breakdown between I and Thou - a merging of two bodies into a single body. It feels more as though my Muse and I are waltzing together, cooperating to create art. I suppose that shows how Western I am in my perspective.
Later:
Walter Kaufman has this to say on the topic of Zen, in his Religions in Four Dimensions:
"Many interpreters of Zen have written as if it had brought to the arts of archery and swordsmanship some utterly unheard of and mysterious quality that cannot be disassociated from a peculiar kind of mysticism. . . . But in fact the mystery is no greater - and no less great - than that involved in the bowmanship of a fine cellist or violinist. He does not look at what he is doing and yet hits the strings precisely as he wishes. This takes years of training and considerable discipline, and it may be mysterious, but it is inseparable from professionalism."
*** 4 May 2008
Visited Mother at the rehabilitation hospital, visited the National Building Museum, visited the D.C. public library, went to Evensong, and went grocery shopping. Doug and I agreed that we would count today's expeditions as our daily exercise.
Doug seemed cheered by the day out, which seems reason enough to try it again next Sunday. I don't feel manic tonight; I feel exhausted and ready to return to my regular schedule.
As I might have predicted from a visit to the D.C. public library, I came home with a backpack full of books. However, nearly all of them are on monasticism (Christian and Buddhist), which means I won't have to search for such writings - either offline or online - for the foreseeable future. That cuts out a big source of my current browsing.
The next week or so is going to be unusual inasmuch as my mother's coming home from the hospital and wants my help with some chores at her place. Other than the above and (maybe) my weekly outing with Doug, I'd like to stick at home for the foreseeable future. The next professional event I'm scheduled to attend (a slash fiction convention) isn't till mid-June.
It's odd how much closer I come to the stereotype of a solitary, the longer I do this. It isn't that I'm trying to head in that direction; it's that I realize I can't get things done without cutting back further on certain activities. It's like when I entered into mentoring, thinking I was only going to mentor my apprentice in writing. Yeah, right.
As for going on the Web only once a month, that turned out to be unworkable: it's just impossible for me to stay off the Web that long, because things come up that need to be dealt with. So my new plan is to go on the Internet only one hour per week (which seems to be my upper limit for tolerance before I get manic), on Friday or Saturday. On days when I'm publishing online and therefore have to stay online longer, the rule will be one hour on, one hour off, till I get my tasks done. We'll see if that works.
This all sounds like I'm changing my schedule daily, but in fact, things are beginning to settle into a regular pattern. It's just a matter of pruning or severely limiting the activities that cause the pattern to break.
*** 7 May 2008
C. S. Lewis said in Reflections on the Psalms, "One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian; one might so easily mistake it for being a good Christian."
Similarly, one might easily mistake reading about simplicity for actually living a simple life.
I've realized, far too belatedly, that my simplicity reading for the past month has been following my greedy-grab pattern of me getting so absorbed in a topic that I start grabbing and skimming every book I can on the subject I've become interested in. (You'll be able to see that from the sheer number of titles at the bottom of this post that I've grabbed this month.) This pattern has to stop.
I'm also facing the problem that I have other nonfiction reading to do that isn't getting done. After careful consideration, I set aside ninety minutes a day (I'd really rather it were more like sixty minutes a day) to reading one chapter each of writings in the following subjects: simplicity, authorship, service and protocol, and Victorian and Edwardian history.
I started on this new schedule a couple of days ago. I was more than a little worried that my one-track mind wouldn't be able to cope with so many different readings in one day, but in fact this tactic seems to be working admirably. Knowing that I can only read one chapter of each writing each day, I find myself slowing down to appreciate better what I'm reading.
I just reread all of my simplicity journal entries for the past month, in preparation for posting them on Friday, and I'm very pleased at how much progress I've made during the past month. My progress hasn't yet made a noticeable impact on the quantity of my writing, but I'm much more aware than I was previously of where my problem areas lie, and am much more inclined to tackle them. If anyone had told me a month ago that I would be willing to sacrifice my near-daily visits to the library during warm weather, I would have been incredulous. The fact that this now seems a sensible course of action to take - indeed, a relief - shows how much my mindset has changed in the past month.
RECENT SIMPLICITY READINGS
Thich Nhat Hanh: "Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life."
Nancy Klein Maguire: "An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order."
Dennis Okholm: "Monk Habits for Everyday People: Benedictine Spirituality for Protestants."
Peter France: "Hermits."
Kathleen Norris: "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography."
Marcia Ford: "Traditions of the Ancients: Vintage Faith Practices for the 21st Century."
St. Therese of Lisieux: "Story of a Soul."
Jon Kabat-Zin: "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life."
Eve Baker: "Paths in Solitude."
Evelyn Underhill: "The Letters of Evelyn Underhill."
Gary Gach: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism."
Eugen Herrigel: "Zen in the Art of Archery."
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Encarta articles on Zen and Japanese art.
John Michael Talbot: "The Way of the Mystics: Ancient Wisdom for Experiencing God Today."
Rita M. Gross and Terry C. Muck (editors): "Christians Talk about Buddhist Meditation, Buddhists Talk about Christian Prayer."
Dennis Patrick Slattery: "Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life."
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