Pen to Paper

I generally don’t plan very far ahead.  For example, I’m going to Chicago for a convention this weekend.  I found out about this convention last Thursday, decided to go Friday, bought a ticket yesterday, and finalized where I’ll be staying tonight.  Not entirely spontaneous – that would mean not making any decision till the first day of the convention.  But not planned our far in advance.  If I were my father, this would have been in the books last January.

It’s hard trying to find a balance between chaotic spontaneity and locked-down over-planning.  Different events have different balances, too, complicating the matter.  Most weddings plans begin forming at least months (and sometimes years) in advance.  On the other hand, most of my meals aren’t decided until the day of (if then).  It’s easy to see that a marriage ceremony and lunch at Panera Bread are at opposite ends of the spectrum.  But how do you decide how much planning is necessary?

One of my track coaches had a phrase he liked to pound into us: Preparation, Performance, Poise.  Preparation referred to our workouts, diet, sleep, and everything else leading up to a race.  Performance, obviously, was the race itself.  Poise referred to the way we carried ourselves before, during, and after the race; in other words, our character.  Having this drilled into me over and over on the track trained me to apply this thinking to all of life.

The standard of adequate preparation is rather hazy.  I think it is incredibly relative.  How much preparation is enough but not too much?  If you can answer ‘yes’ to the question, “Am I prepared?” then you’re ready.  Note: this does not mean that you are ready to meet some arbitrary standard, or that you will perform with a high degree of success.  It simply means that you have prepared enough for your personal goals that you aren’t wasting energy worrying, and you aren’t causing yourself undue stress by over-thinking and excess preparation.  Personally, I like to rehearse the event in my head.  If I come up with obstacles that I haven’t already planned for or don’t think I can handle on the fly, I have more preparation to do.  If everything runs smoothly in my mind, then I’m good to go.

Performance is the culmination of all the preparations.  Society has developed many ways of describing it: “On the night,” “D-Day,” “Game Day,” “Go-time,” and more.  I believe that if you have properly and adequately prepared, the performance should be a relaxed event.  I don’t mean that there is no intensity, no effort, no emotion – any athlete or entertainer will tell you that performing well requires a high level of effort.  Rather, the performance should not be filled with stress and worry about “Am I ready?”  You should be able to relax and trust in your preparation.

A word should be said about proper goal-setting (a subject for its own post, but worth mentioning here).  Setting the right goals can make a large difference in the level of preparation required.  When I ran my first marathon earlier this year, my goals were to finish and have fun.  Because of this, I had a much lower level of preparation than if I were aiming for a specific time or trying to qualify for a major marathon.  And in the end, I met my goals and had a great time in the process.

The final aspect, poise, is often overlooked.  My coach always emphasized that good sportsmanship and carrying ourselves with dignity after a race was just as important as the race itself.  I think this can be expanded to your character throughout life.  In all of the preparations and performances you go through, people are judging your character.  Russell Crowe delivers amazing performances, but his temper and grating character off-screen are legendary.  The glowing bride may look angelic walking down the aisle, but her maid-of-honor know what a demon she’s been for the past five months.  The man in the next cubicle may make everyone laugh, but never deliver his part of a project.  On the other hand, I’m sure you know someone who always seems confidently relaxed, carrying their weight and helping those around them.  This last person embodies poise.

Preparation, Performance, Poise.  Three simple concepts.  Together, though, they make for less stressful and more successful life.

Goals

A little over a month ago, I began a process of self-examination.  I stepped back to take a breath and look at my life, and I wasn’t happy with what I saw.  Someone pointed out to me that if our goals determine our actions, then by looking at our day-to-day actions we can deduce what goals our  lives will reach in the end.  Taking this approach and applying it to my own life, I realize that the way I had been living was not consistent with the life I want to have in 5, 10, 20 years, and so on.

I had gone beyond being content.  I had become complacent.  I was a consumer, feeding my daily appetites without lifting my eyes to see what was on the horizon, beckoning for my attention.

What did I do, coming to this realization?  Thinking that the solution to a lack of direction was concrete planning, I literally sat down and wrote out several lists.  What do I care about?  What are my goals in these area?  What steps do I need to take to reach these goals?  A pile of papers filled with scribbles grew on my desk.  And as the weeks went on, I could see that I was starting to make changes in how I spent my time.  It wasn’t enough, though.  I couldn’t seem to find enough time in the days and weeks to reach all the milestones I had set for myself.

At first, I began to panic.  Why was I not following the plans I had set up, the plans I thought to be well within my capabilities?  Didn’t they lead to goals I wanted to reach?  How could I live a goal-oriented life if I couldn’t even reach the small goals?

Distractions

One week ago, I was looking at the To-Do list I had made for myself and I realized that distractions aren’t limited to the periphery.  It’s easy to see that things like video games, Facebook, forums, and general web browsing can be distractions that bog down the day, taking time without giving anything back.  What was harder to see is that good things, goals that we do want to reach, can be distractions as well.

Take physical fitness, for example.  I finished my first marathon in January.  I was woefully under-trained, and was not very proud of the time I posted (proud that I finished: yes; proud of the way I finished: no).  Since then, I have not exercised much and generally been slothful.  “Okay,” I thought to myself.  “Here’s a goal.  I’ll do another marathon this fall, and this time I’ll train properly all the way up to it.”  I printed off a training plan I found online, and thought I was good to go.  After a month, though, I knew I was just falling behind the training plan.  Instead of running daily, I was getting in one or two days a week.  Instead of saying “I want to be fit,” and pursuing that through various means, I saw the training plan as the only benchmark for success.

This wasn’t the only setback.  Many of the other goals and plans I had set for myself were in similar states of partial completion.  Instead of putting myself back on track, I was feeling guilty about letting myself down.

At the same time, though, something strange was happening in my thinking.  While the majority of the goals I thought were concrete grew hazier, one became more and more solid in my mind.  I began to feel that all the other goals could go by the wayside if I just pursued and chased after this one vision.

As this realization dawned on me, I saw that while the other goals had been good, I had set them too high.  These “want-to’s” did not belong on the same level as the “have-to.”  By elevating the secondary, I was distracting myself from the Primary.

Vision

People have different names for the Primary.  For some, it is a Calling.  Others, a Mission.  I like the terms Vision and Passion, but they all work.  I capitalize these words here, because when you speak with someone who has latched on to their Vision you can her the capitalization in their voice and see it in their eyes.  You can tell that they are pursuing something of significance with their lives.

The Vision that has been living in my mind for several years, but only recently gaining weight and solidity, is to be a Writer (again, the capital).  There are many authors who are published.  There are a few, though, whose works have endured and grown in the public mind to become an institution greater than a person putting their ideas on paper.  Think of William Shakespeare.  Henry David Thoreau.  Mark Twain.  Emily Dickinson.  Edgar Allan Poe.  H.P. Lovecraft.  Jules Verne.  C.S. Lewis.  J.R.R. Tolkien.  Ray Bradbury.  Isaac Asimov.  Robert Heinlein.  Arthur C. Clarke.  Orson Scott Card.  Douglas Adams.  This list probably gives you an idea of where my tastes lie, but it’s not meant to be exclusive – just exemplary.  Is it too lofty to dream of adding my name to the list?

Realizing that this is the goal, the Vision that I need to pursue, had two effects.  First was a sense of guilt over how I’ve used (or misused) the past year and a half.  This quickly faded in the sense of freedom I had.  Deciding to pursue one goal all-out freed me to say “these other goals are just distractions.  I can work towards them or not, but I don’t have to.  They don’t have a claim on me.”

Pruning

In effect, this realization let me prune my goals.  The purpose of pruning a plant is to remove unwanted parts in order to encourage growth in desired area.  Let me apply this gardening imagery to my thought process.  Initially, I had a plot of land that I wasn’t doing much with.  Grass, weeds, a few bushes, but by and large the growth and development of the land was unguided.  By generating concrete lists of goals, I was simultaneously trying to remove weeds and plant several different trees.  Now, by latching on to a Vision, I feel like I am trimming back most of the trees and bushes in order to encourage one particular tree to grow.  Not removing the other plants, but not giving them undue preference.

The Next Few Months

You may be asking yourself, “Okay, so what’s he going to do now?”  First off, I’m going to spend more time writing – a lot more time.  That includes this site.  At the beginning of the year, I wrote down that I wanted to have a blog I was updating at least three times per week with professional quality.  Clearly, that hasn’t been happening.  It will.  I’m also planning on doing some redesign for the site, in order to make it more my own.

Second, I’m going to pursue publication.  For a long time, I’ve had a fear of submission, as though putting my work out to be rejected was worse than not creating anything at all.  Well, I’m already unpublished.  There is no possible way that I could become less published than I am now.  That will change.

If you’ve come this far, let me challenge you.  Is your life consistent taking you where you want to be down the road?  Are your goals detracting from your Passion?  Don’t give into the the trap of paralyzation through constant introspection, but a little bit of self-examination can go a long way.

It’s hard to know what’s safe to say about The Happening.  I tend to laugh at people who get worked up about “spoilers,” but at the same time I think there are some movies that should not be spoiled.  Sometimes it’s hard to draw a line between what is “spoiling” a movie and what is simply describing it.

I mention this because I don’t think it’s possible to to say anything specific about The Happening without someone thinking you’re spoiling the movie for them.  The truth is, everything is laid out for the viewers in the first 15-20 minutes.  The rest of the film is simply the unraveling of the premise.  This is unusual for M. Night Shyamalan, known for his twist endings and jaw dropping reveals (admit it – you didn’t know he was a ghost).  But then, this whole movie felt below par for his work.

The Happening follows a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg), his wife (Zooey Deschanel), along with their friend (John Leguizamo) and his daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they try to survive a series of “attacks” or “events.”  These biological attacks cause victims to become disoriented and confused, then suicidal.  The myriad of death scenes and sequences that follow from this premise more than earn this movie its R rating.  At times I felt like I was watching an old Bruce Campbell movie in the way each death tried to top the last.

Some of the acting was top notch.  Wahlberg and Deschanel occasionally have moments and lines where they make the audience fall in love with their characters.  Leguizamo shines in his supporting role, as he always does.  However, all the actors spend most of the movie fighting a bad script, forcing out awkward dialogue and trying to make it sound natural.  I left with the impression that Shyamalan, impressed with Diablo Cody’s script for Juno, tried to capture the same youthful and trendy banter for his characters.  Shyamalan, however, is not Diablo Cody, and Wahlberg’s science teacher winds up sounding like a freshman liberal arts major trying to seem intelligent.  You know the guy I’m talking about – the one who has to share his poorly phrased repackaging of everything the teacher says, and thinks he’s impressing his teacher and classmates.

Actually, the dialogue problem is only symptomatic is a silliness throughout the script.  Various characters repeatedly demonstrate either a misunderstanding or ignorance of basic evolutionary functions.  Plants menace the characters with a toxin, but only when the plants that are blowing in a strong breeze.  This lead me to the conclusion that for this movie, not only can plants control their own evolution through force of will and communicate and coordinate biological warfare with other plants; they can also control the wind, stirring up gale-force winds to distribute their poisonous pollen.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t the conclusion I was supposed to draw, though.  No, the message of the film is very blatantly “Humans are hurting the environment, and sooner or later it will hurt us back.”  This is delivered repeatedly like a slap across the face, being stated explicitly by various characters and screaming through the backgrounds where signs proclaim “You Deserve This” and steam billows from nuclear reactors.

Perhaps that is the meaning of seeing this film.  After paying the full price of admission to a movie whose tag-line puns on the director’s previous films, maybe I did indeed get what I deserved.  You don’t have to, though.  Wait for the DVD.  And then try to get someone else to pay for the rental.

The least significant, off-the-cuff, throwaway comments can set off a wild chain of thoughts, if you let them.  It’s happened to me twice tonight.

To a degree, this can be a good thing.  “The unexamined life is not worth living,” after all.  To take a moment, step back, and examine our actions can help us reevaluate our goals and whether our current course will lead us to them.  The next step, though, must always be to move back into action.  The driver who pulls off to the side of the road to check his map must eventually put it back in the glove box and return to the road.  Perpetual self-examination leads only to perpetual non-motion.

For too long I’ve been stuck in the mental phase – the brainstorming, goal-setting, course-plotting mindset.  Now I want to drop myself into gear and move forward.  I want to leave this place of safety and security and press out into the wilderness, towards the dreams I have glimpsed on the horizon.

Will you come with me?  Will you help me make a path through the wild and the dark unknown?

Adventure is calling.