Archive for October 2008
Getting Past a Hatred of Mondays
Mondays are always difficult. I need to get up early and re-program myself to my work-week existence. My mind is still in relaxation mode. Last week’s work-week tension just left my body last evening while watching TV.
I suppose, in this day and age, any day can be Monday. I once worked on Saturdays and (sometimes) on Sundays. My weekend was Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday was my Monday.
It doesn’t matter which day of the week Monday falls on, it still feels like Monday. I’m too far entrenched in the culture-wide hatred of Monday to quibble about whether it’s really Monday. Monday–to my way of thinking–is a generic term for the worst day of the week.
I know that’s bad. I’m working on it.
What is writing? Is it paper or process?
What is writing? Is it paper or process?
Most people would probably say paper. I’m not so sure. I’m becoming more and more aware of writing as process, though I’m willing to concede this is somewhat a false choice.
How can I say that writing is process? Writing must be the end result, right? In other words writing is most definitely paper. I’m using the idea of words on paper as a representation of the end result. (I could use “screen” rather than paper to keep current with the idea of writing as it appears in the blogosphere. However, the idea of writing as “screen or process” was not quite as alliterative as “paper or process”.)
Is there a methodology to spiritual formation?
Is this an odd way of approaching this subject? I could ask “What is your preferred method celebrating your anniversary?” or “What is your preferred method of loving your children or or your siblings or your parents or your spouse?”
You’d be able to tell me something that can be indentified as a method. The method, however, is not the thing itself. Relationships are not sustained by a methodology.
Or are they?
Daily Task Completion
I sometimes need help getting things done. I don’t need a lot of help. Once I start, I’m fine. I just need help keeping my focus on whatever it is I’m doing until I finish it. Once I do that, then I need help with deciding what to do next. On and on and on.
I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and his system works, to a point. He says that you should call something a “project” if it contains more than two tasks. The individual tasks can then be added to a Next Actions list. At any given time, according to Allen, I could have 75-80 projects with God only knows how many Next Actions. These discrete actions, then, should be classified further and placed on lists according to context and labeled: @phone, @computer, @home, @waitinguntildaughtergetsoutofbathroom, etc.
I don’t know why, but I’ve never been able to get the context thing to work like how it’s billed.
I found myself counting the number of Next Actions completed to determine the success or failure of my day. A large number of Next Actions signaled a success, a low number failure. I was running at a breakneck pace for a long stretch of time. I was completing actions like there was no tomorrow. Average task completions per day–a key metric–were at an all-time high. But I was padding the list with relatively insignificant Next Actions. Meanwhile, important projects languished from inattention.
NaNoWriMo Plans
I’m working on ideas for a novel for next month’s NaNoWriMo.
The novel may consist of an expansion of posts from this blog. Maybe this one, only longer.
Or, this one.
I’m also thinking about my characters.
And My plot.
But, I can’t use any of the words I’ve already written. By November 30, I hope to have a 50,000 word novel written. That’s approximately 1,700 words a day.
I’ll be posting excerpts. Stay tuned.
Meaning and Politics
It’s time for a return to the archives and repost an entry first posted in May 2007. It seems more approriate today than it did then. If I ask myself whether I still feel this way, I might answer: Yes, even more so.
C. S. Lewis is said to have hated conversations about politics. There was no subject that bored him more.
I have great respect for C. S. Lewis; but this was one area where I disagreed with him. I thought that he was dead wrong about this.
A Look Before the Season
Yesterday, before work, I saw this guy out our kitchen window. I scrambled into the bedroom to grab the camera and, when I went back to the kitchen, he was still there. I needed to hurry the shot because he was trying to decide whether or not he should be watching me through the window or running from the neighbor’s beagle. A few seconds later, he was gone. Life in the suburbs!
Storing Our Selves
Phyllis Tickle has written an excellent book called The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.
I’ll devote later posts to a more detailed discussion of the book, but for now I’ll highlight one idea gleaned from a cursory reading while still standing in line at the bookstore.
She teases an idea about To Do lists being respositories of our knowledge of what we need do next. Calculators become crutches used for running simple sums once run inside our own heads. Part of this, of course, is cultural. The speed at which life happens makes machines necessary for us to keep pace.
Creating in Time
Allow me to provide an overly simplistic paraphrase of an idea Kenneth Atchity puts forward in A Writer’s Time: Writing is nothing more than a transcript of an argument you have with yourself. You begin any writing project by making a decision. A portion of your mind will reject that decision. This causes the creative tension neccesary to write something down.
Advice Before Beginning Spiritual Work
I am compiling information about what we like to call spiritual disciplines. The following is a sober warning to beware about thinking we’re accomplishing too much in the spiritual life.
From a letter C. S. Lewis sent to Arthur Greeves, 15 June, 1930:
Mundane Mondays: Values
Mundane Mondays
My posts on Mondays will focus on the seemingly mundane things related to how I approach work. Today’s post will concentrate on determining VALUES.
Just why DID he write that letter? (2)
We might say the reason John wrote the letter we call 1st John was to refute a kind of proto-Gnosticism. This is not wrong; it is a valid statement. But his reason to write the letter amounts to so much more than that. Read the rest of this entry »
Just why DID he write that letter?
John the Apostle
Passing years have given me the option to relax about writing more than when I was in my thirties.
