1/28/2011 - stories, they want to remember. . .

Catherine Price, the woman who wrote the introduction to the gratitude journal that started this project, said that she kept a diary of daily thanks for four weeks as an initial experiment, and at the end of that time, she came out a happier person, one who learned to instinctively see more of the good in life than the bad.  The inception of my blog was, obviously, built around this concept and goal.

However, as I sit here, writing the 28^th entry 28 days later, I can’t help but feel like I have failed in some way.  I do not feel any of what Price describes; in fact, I can’t say with confidence that I have changed at all.  I still focus on the have-nots just as much as I always have, still complain about my job, think less than noble thoughts.  I don’t wake up singing “I Got the Sun in the Mornin’ (and the Moon at Night),” don’t go to bed counting blessings instead of sheep.  Mornings, especially during the week, are as painful as ever, happiness just as elusive.  I still regularly forget just how lucky I am and how much love I have in my life.

However, where I know I have not failed is in volume.  I have produced one piece of writing a day for the last 28 days, despite spotty quality from entry to entry.  This goal I have attained, though not without challenges.  Two weeks ago, I wondered if I could keep up this pace, considered dropping to maybe one entry every other day, or even once a week.  The other day, I could not feel satisfied with what I wrote, and spent over an hour on something that I ended up scrapping altogether.  This past weekend, I told Gordon that this project is getting harder and harder, and he was surprised; shouldn’t it be getting easier?

And in the midst of thinking that I would eventually have to cut back on frequency, to succumb to the possibility that I may give up at some point, I attended the innovative thinking seminar yesterday, led by Iris Firstenberg.  As I said then, it was an amazing seminar, and she was an insurmountable force of positive energy.  I learned a lot, applicable to both my work and personal lives, but it was what she closed the seminar with that really made a difference:  People forget facts, but stories, they want to remember.

I read stories, think in stories, and while my MFA degree is in creative writing, the emphasis was on poetry.  For two years, I read and wrote and thought about poetry.  However, I quickly realized that I was not like my classmates, that I may not be cut out to be a poet.  My poems always needed a story line, a narrative arc that took the first word of a poem and led it to the last, thus giving all the words in between a sense of meaning and purpose.  But instructors said that my work was too narrative; classmates thought them straight-forward.  It became apparent that my poetry, at least in their eyes, did not belong in the same echelon as the “language” poems, abstract poems, the ever-revered jazz poems that they wrote and respected.

Which, to my narrative ears, most often seemed like a mish-mash of words with no punctuation, random line breaks, a stream of espousal that culminated in an abrupt drop-off, stop, silence.  The poem could easily have ended one word earlier, or one word later, for that matter, and I would not have known the difference.  During others' workshops, I often wanted to say that I just didn’t get it, not out of spite but genuine non-understanding, but I knew that it would be the equivalent of confessing that I was a bourgeois idiot, which I felt like I was already broadcasting anyway through the poems I turned in, narrative after narrative.

Like this blog, which is essentially just one big narrative, and early last week, I had a crisis of sorts.  I felt ashamed of the stories I was telling here.  I suddenly was 25 again, sitting in class with a poem about a boy and a circus and feeling like the sad outsider knocking on doors of better poets and writers.  I felt like I should be truer to the goals of this project and just list things I'm grateful for (air, music, diet Coke).  And I tried, worked on a piece lauding the greatness of sunshine for an hour.  And I consistently wanted to inject some plot into it, introduce a character, a friend, a memory of when I was young and kids from the neighborhood came into my garage one hot afternoon where I was helping my grandfather saw two-by-fours.  They asked me to play with them, and I said no.  I wrote out this story, then deleted it, then praised the sunshine in San Francisco, then started describing the heat of that afternoon 20 years ago, then deleted it, then extolled the virtues of vitamin D or K or whatever you're supposed to get from sunshine, then went back to describing how I felt when those kids walked away and I only stood there, wanting to walk with them in the sun.

I couldn't stop telling the story, and I was frustrated.  Hearing Iris say that people want stories, they remember stories, and their brains naturally create stories for themselves gave me the confidence to stay true not necessarily to the goals of this project, but to the style of my writing that I had relied on all my life, for better or worse.  I am grateful for stories, even if they sometimes derail me from the original intent of this blog.  Without stories, I don't think I would care about this blog as much.  It wouldn't matter to me if it's sunny today, or rainy tomorrow, or if I heard my favorite song on the radio.  Those things don't say anything about me, but the stories that they inspire, well, I am those stories.