In the deep midwinter

In this new year, I’m setting intentions and not resolutions. Perhaps the difference is barely perceptible to most but to me they are distinguishable by how they make me feel.

Resolutions are like the bullseye in an archery game.  To feel like I’ve accomplished my resolution, I have to hit the bullseye every time.  What happens if I don’t?  Well, the disappointment and discouragement follow.  I keep missing it so why bother?  Who hasn’t had that feeling a month into a New Year’s Resolution? Who hasn’t given up just because they couldn’t get it right the first time?

Intentions, on the other hand, are the bullseye and the whole target and even perhaps some of the space around the target.  If you breathe deeply, take aim calmly, there’s a good chance of coming close more often than not and even hitting the bullseye.  The important aspect of intention in my archery game is to keep shooting.  Aim and shoot.  Aim and shoot.

In writing, a resolution is making the statement that I will write 1,000 words when I sit down to write.  I can often write 1,000 words at a time, but then I might not or I might have that momentum for a few days but then I fizzle out and need a break.  A writing intention is saying I will sit down to write every day.  It doesn’t matter how much I write, just that I do it each day no matter how I feel, no matter what else is going on in my life.  Aim and shoot.

What are your intentions for 2012?

You’re scheming on a thing; that’s sabotage

I’ve always wanted to be writer. As a 7-year-old I self-published my first book, stapled together with crayola drawings and some narrative. It was about time travel and the crush I had on a boy named Jurgen in my class. Yet despite these early ambitions, and the followings years of keeping a daily dairy, writing poetry and short stories, I never considered it as a career or even a major in college. I am fantastically well versed in sabotaging my own creativity.

In college I pursued the hard sciences, believing this is how I would be happy, or make other people happy. Being serious, doing serious scientific work. But my heart wasn’t in it, and I fell into nonprofit work after college. Wasn’t that how I was going to be happy? Making the world a better place. It was satisfying enough work because I often had an outlet to write even if it was mostly technical and trade writing.

Somewhere in between becoming a mother, watching my husband achieve his own publishing success and realizing that I can only go so far with making a career out of other people’s expectations, I decided it was time to stop worrying about making art (thank you Julia Cameron) and just do what I love. I’m still good at sabotaging myself. I find a way to do laundry or pay bills in the little time I have alloted to write during naps or babysitters, but I’m getting better. I know my saboteur so well, I know that she has the best intentions. She would like me to have a clean house, everything in order, before I dare to start writing.

Today I got away, mess and all, and wrote.

She said she can’t

I recently sent my Swiss grandmother, Oma, a journal.  Along with the journal I sent an earnest note I wrote in my best German asking her to please start writing down her memories.  I was particularly interested in her experience as a Swiss “Auslander” (foreigner) in East Prussia prior and during World War II, and how she came back to Switzerland and what that was like for her.

A week later I received a nice email from my Oma saying that she received my package.  She liked the preschool art I included courtesy of my 4-year-old.  She thanked me for the pictures and for the journal.  And then she said she can’t honor my request to write down those memories.  Oma went on to say that she never spoke of her horrible war experiences to my father, and therefore, she was not able to share them with me.

She wrote that she understands that this was a different century, that now people talk about the bad things that happened to them.   She wrote that now we have the most horrible crimes and wars broadcast directly into our living rooms, yet we have not changed.  Nothing about this new modern openness has made us any better.  Translated from German she wrote, “humanity continues to build more weapons, create more wars.”

I was at once disappointed and moved by her response.  My motives for sending her the journal were mixed.  I had started on a fiction novel inspired by an image I had of her stepping off a train in Switzerland, and now I wanted to fill in the vast space that starting a novel creates by getting information directly from the source.  I had also recently started psychotherapy again, and the experiences that had transpired in my childhood with my rigid, authoritarian and sometimes cruel Swiss grandmother had shaped me in both good and bad ways.  I thought that understanding the horrors she experienced would help me understand why she had treated me the way she did all those years.

It was a different century, and here I was going to try to make it all better by writing it out.  I’m left with blank pages I must fill myself, imaging what happened to her from secondary sources and other people’s stories.  Will it change me?  Will it make me any better?  That doesn’t seem to be the point anymore.  I just have to tell the story as I imagine it even if she can’t.