A week-long road trip with the kiddos means this is the first minute I’ve taken all week to write in my diary. My wife’s at the wheel and I could be sleeping or gazing out the window, but here I am, writing, and blogging about writing. (On my phone, no less.) It never ends… but soon this tour will.
Whenever someone I know has a new baby, I re-read this part of Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
In this short video James Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, suggests that rather than giving up something for Lent, we try instead to do something active and positive: “Be kind.”
His tips:
1) Don’t be a jerk.
2) Honor the absent.
3) Always give people the benefit of the doubt.
The video made me think of George Saunders’ wonderful commencement speech, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, in which he says, “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” He suggests a worthy goal in life is to “Try to be kinder.” How?
Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.
He also says the good news is that we tend to get kinder as we get older: “as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.”
When Roger Ebert was at the peak of his blogging in 2009, death on his mind, he wrote a post about his beliefs, and wrote about kindness:
I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:
“I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals.I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”
For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up.
“Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
Why is being kind so hard? From a review of On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor:
The punch line of the book is that we are, each of us, battling back against our innate kindness, with which we are fairly bursting, at every turn. Why? Because “real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. . . . By involving us with strangers . . . as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.” By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, hoarding scraps from the lost magical kindness of childhood, terrified that our hatred is stronger than our love.
As with so many things in life, it helps to think of kindness as a verb (something you do) and not a noun (something you have). Here’s Emily Esfahani Smith:
There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise.
I suspect that one way to be kinder to others is to be kinder to yourself. Being kind to yourself isn’t just about saying affirmations in the mirror or whatever. It’s, for example, giving yourself time to be completely absorbed in something. I love this post by Liz Danzico about playing music:
Learning to play music is an long exercise learning to be kind to yourself. As your fingers stumble to keep up with your eyes and ears, your brain will say unkind things to the rest of you. And when this tangle of body and mind finally makes sense of a measure or a melody, there is peace. Or, more accurately, harmony. And like the parents who so energetically both fill a house with music and seek its quietude, both are needed to make things work. As with music, it takes a lifetime of practice to be kind to yourself. Make space for that practice, and the harmony will emerge.
I don’t know how to end this, so here’s a couple lines from W.H. Auden’s “Moon Landing,” collected in Selected Poems:
We were always adroiter / with objects than lives, and more facile / at courage than kindness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymDPQodemU4
And here’s Philip Larkin, from “The Mower”:
…we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time.
I posted the galley (a galley is an advance reading copy for booksellers and reviewers) of Keep Going on my Instagram a few days ago, and a lot of people said, “April?!? That’s 5 months from now! What the heck takes so long?”
A year from sale to pub date is actually pretty danged fast by the standards of the publishing industry. (For example, I signed the contract for my first book in summer of 2008 and it wasn’t published until the fall of 2010.) What’s unusual is for us to be so far ahead in the process by now. We really cranked on this one.
In the spirit of showing my work, here’s a timeline to give you an idea of how quickly (and how slowly) this book happened:
– March 6, 2014: Show Your Work! is published.
– 2014-2018: My wife has our second son, I publish the journal, then angst for a few years over whether I’ll actually ever write another book again.
– 2016-2018: Country descends into political chaos and I — and almost everybody I know — become depressed and distracted.
– January 2017: Start a daily diary.
– October 1, 2017: Start daily blogging again.
– February 14, 2018: Start working on a new talk about staying creative in chaotic times.
– March 9: Give the talk, hand my literary agent a rough outline of a book proposal.
– April 2: After much angst and work, finish book proposal, my agent submits it to my editor.
– April 10: Publisher buys book.
– May 14: Submit first draft to editor.
– June 13: Submit full manuscript and illustrations to editor.
– July – August: Proof, edit, revise various passes, work up all the extra stuff that goes in the book. (Back matter, lettering, etc.)
– September: Finish proofing, nail down cover and jacket copy.
– A few days ago: Bound galleys arrive.
– Two days ago: Editor proofing “the blues” — printouts from the printer — I suggest a couple of last-minute changes.
– Now – April 2: Publisher must get a 100,000+ books printed and distributed, publicist has to plan 25-city tour, sales team has to reach out to booksellers, retailers, etc., and a ton of other work that I don’t even see has to happen. I must remain calm during “The Gulp,” and try to find something new to work on, while not annoying y’all with news of a book that isn’t out yet. (Also: The world needs to not explode.)
I found this quote from a 2002 Jeff Tweedy interview hanging in my old room at my mom’s house earlier this summer. It’s from Newsweek, which means I must’ve read it in print. (My mom had a subscription.) Here’s the whole quote:
To say I’ve never been inhibited by expectations would be a lie. It’s more daunting to contend with yourself. It’s like saying I don’t even need to write songs because the greatest songwriter in the world has already done this—Bob Dylan. But he’s dealing with himself, too. The internal stuff is the stuff that kills you. I want to write the greatest song in the world sometimes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in wanting to do that, but I think you’re better off when you realize you have no control over it. You just gotta keep making s–t up, scribbling—like sitting down and drawing with my kids. It reminds me to do that in my songs. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. I think it looks great. Let’s hang it on the refrigerator.
I have always felt like this blog is my refrigerator. I make something, or I clip out something I like, and I put it on the refrigerator. The next day, I go and find something else to put on the fridge.
One year ago today I started daily blogging again. That was 350 posts ago. (I took a break for two weeks in July.) When I begin, I had no idea what to do next. Now, I’m back to the same point — once again, I have no idea what to do next — but I have a book coming out next year to show for it. I know that book wouldn’t exist in the shape its in if I hadn’t gone back to what works for me: Putting things on the refrigerator.
The irony of this metaphor is that we now have a big stainless steel refrigerator in our kitchen. The front isn’t magnetic; therefore, it’s totally worthless for hanging art. Maybe that’s a good thing to keep in mind: Make sure your refrigerator doesn’t get too fancy…
Back in February I sat down with Mike Rohde and recorded a conversation for his Sketchnote Army podcast about how I work. It was recorded on an iPhone in a noisy coffee shop downtown, but it has a casual, candid feel to it that I enjoyed.
I was right in the middle of writing the talk that would become my new book, and while I don’t talk about the book at all, I talk a lot about the process of getting to it: going back to daily blogging, putting out the newsletter, having a repeatable daily practice for generating work, reading Thoreau’s journals, watching Ralph Steadman draw, etc.
Listen here.
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