Clutter Control

I'm on a mission. I've been cleaning out closets and drawers all over my house, muttering the words "be ruthless" as I try to decide what stays and what goes. As of yesterday, my hall closet is a mere shadows of its former self. For the first time in umpteen years, I can get a pair of gloves off the shelf without having a virtual storm of hats and gloves and scarves raining down on my head. And the towels and cosmetics in the bathroom linen closet all have their own separate and pristine stations.

Today I'm tackling my "office" - the room I call my own for reading, writing, meditating, and occasionally sleeping (when my husband's snoring gets out of control). The winnowing process in this room could be painful - after all, this is where my books and notebooks and folders with ideas jotted on scraps of paper all end up.

How do I decide what's worth keeping and what should be consigned to the circular file?

"The relationship between clutter and creativity is inverse," wrote Jeff Goins, in a recent blog post titled Your Clutter is Killing Your Creativity. "The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter. Mess creates stress. Which is far from an ideal environment for being brilliant." 

Does mess create stress for you?  I know it does for me. Because my personality places a premium on neatness and order, my brain gets fatigued in cluttered environments. When I'm surrounded with haphazard piles of papers and books, I can feel my mind go into a frenzy. Where do I start? What do I look at first? Should I clean up this stack, file these documents?

These kinds of thoughts adversely affect the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area in charge of executive functioning - the way we apply our thoughts to the completion of goals. When the goal is writing and creative thinking, it's wise to keep this area of the brain as clutter free as possible.

So I'm off to put my prefrontal cortex to work on a system of organizing and ordering all the creative objects floating around my office space.

How about you? Do you think clutter affects your creative ability? Or do you thrive amidst artistic disarray?

On Ice

It's mighty cold around these parts. How cold is it?

Cold enough that when I went out yesterday I wore a thick sweater underneath my heaviest coat on which I zipped both the inner and outer zippers. I even deigned to pull the hood over my head to block the wind. For a girl who dresses to accomodate hot flashes rather than thermometer readings, those clothing choices totally reflect the bone chilling atmosphere.

Despite those heroic measures, I was still shaking in my boots.

It wasn't only the weather that was chilling. I witnessed an incident in the grocery store that really set my teeth on edge.

Like many supermarkets, our local store has a bottle return area just inside the entry doors. There are five bottle return slots, but there are still usually people lined up and waiting to recycle cart loads of plastic empties. (Personally, hauling empty plastic bottles back to the store and standing around feeding them into holes in the wall is enough to turn me completely against drinking soda or beer anyway, but that's a story for another day.)

There were only a couple of people waiting and I manuevered around them to pull an empty cart out of the queue. Suddenly, an elderly man with a basket full of bottles storms out in front of me and rams his cart up against the basket of another man who had stepped up to the bottle return.

"Just what the h#*$ do you think you're doing??" he shouted, right in the man's face. "I have been standing here waiting for the next available slot and you dare to just walk up and take it???"

The other gentleman (also an older man) was nonplussed for a moment. I honestly don't think he knew this man had been waiting. He said something that I couldn't hear, but, the first man wasn't giving up - in fact, he had escalated into full blown rage. He was physically quite a bit taller and bigger than the man he was verbally attacking, and was standing very close to him so that he towered over him. He was shouting directly in his face.

"You need to MOVE YOUR A&$ right now! Did you hear me?  It is not your turn! I have been waiting and waiting and you have NO RIGHT to go in front of me. You better just MOVE YOUR A*&!"

He was going on and on in this vein, and the other man was now getting angry and shouting back, although I couldn't hear what he was saying. A young mother with two small boys was trying to get her children away. I was trying to hurry my own mother out of the way (which isn't easy, because she moves pretty slowly these days).  When I finally got inside the store, I ran over to the manager's window.

"There are a couple of men out there involved in a nasty confrontation," I said. The manager, a strong, young whippersnapper, headed out to handle the situation, but I could still hear them going at it for several more minutes.

Finally, I saw the manager come in and go back into the store offices and I continued with my shopping. As I wandered through the store, I was shocked to see the aggressor in there shopping, still belligerently muttering as he shoved his cart through the aisles. I imagined he had been sent packing to take his business elsewhere - that was certainly what he deserved, if not a trip to the police station for a cooling off period of his own.

So I've been wondering ever since - is behavior like that considered acceptable enough that we simply slap people on the wrist and send them about their normal business? Or are people (like the store manager) fearful of repercussions if they censure customers who behave badly dangerously?

As I watched this man become consumed with rage over a virtually unimportant incident, I couldn't help but think that if he were carrying a gun there might have been some horrible, even deadly, consequences

And that thought sends the kind of chill up my spine that no amount of warm clothing will prevent.

The Word

In what has become something of a tradition around here, we went out for a pizza dinner on New Year's Eve. Not just any pizza, mind you. We call it the Buddy's Blow Out meal - not just the Buddy's original deep dish super pizza, but antipasto, chicken tenders, and a Sanders hot fudge cream puff for dessert.

Yep. It blows our diet all to hell, that's for sure.

But we deserve it once a year.

We ordered our customary four-square pizza, and were happily munching away at our salads and chicken tenders when a server arrived.

"Large super pizza?" he inquired, already squeezing this huge eight slice pie onto the table.

"Oh no," I said, "we ordered a small pizza."

Our original waitperson stopped over. "Let me check," she said, and dashed over to the computer screen nearby. "Kitchen's mistake," she said when she came back. "I put in an order for a small, but they made a large instead.  Guess it's your lucky day!"

"Well," I said to my husband at the end of the meal as we boxed up an extra six slices of pizza for the fridge, "maybe this is a good omen -a sign we'll always get more than we expect in 2012."

"Hope so," he said, scooping up the last bites of hot fudge from the plate.

I hope so too, because I'm expecting quite a bit from 2012. Life started shaking up in a good way during 2011 (when I quit my job and became a grandmother),but I'd like to keep shaking it even more in 2012.

Last week I wrote about choosing one word to encapsulate my vision for the new year. When I wrote that post, I had already chosen my word. It came to me while I was on an airplane, flying to Texas to spend Christmas with my son and his family. I was reading a magazine and realized how rarely I read anything other than books or websites. It then occurred to me that my life had become narrow in other ways as well. I don't listen to music or even the radio very often. There are only a few TV shows I follow, and I don't often go to movies. I haven't been to a concert or an art exhibit in more than year. I go to the same old stores, wear the same kinds of clothes, do my hair and makeup the same ways as I have for years.

My activities and social life are tunneling inward too. I don't belong to any groups other than church choir. Now that I'm not working, I spend entire days alone in the house with only the dogs, my books, and the internet for company.

The word that came to me while I was flying was this...

E X P A N D

I want to expand my interests, my energy, and my experiences in 2012.

And after our pizza blow out the other night, I realize that it's also vitally important to expand my expectations. Part of the reason I pull back from new things is the fear that they won't live up to my expectations. Not only do I need more faith that new experiences will be positive, but I also must be prepared to accept it if they aren't and move forward without retreating into my shell of familiarity.

 We ordered big at Buddy's on New Year's Eve, and got even more than we expected.

I want to continue that trend for the next 12 months.

How about you? Have you chosen a word or words for 2012? Care to share them with me?

*Just before posting this, I was reading Kerstin's blog about her word for the year, and her decision to choose supporting words at random each month. I like this idea (I also love the way she's converting her words into a visual project) and I'd love to solicit your opinions.  How about some suggestions for words to support my idea to EXPAND? 

Clean Slate

Do you remember a toy called the Etch-A-Sketch? It was an 8 x 10 screen encased in red plastic with two knobs that, when turned, created thin graphite lines on the screen. It was one of my favorite childhood toys.  The downside was that you could only draw vertical lines - but since I wasn't much of an artist, it didn't really matter to me. One of my favorite things to do was twist and turn those knobs almost maniacally, until the entire screen was black with graphite shavings. Then I'd turn the Etch-A-Sketch upside down, give it couple of swift shakes, and all the lines would disappear.

Clean slate.

I feel somewhat the same way on the days leading up to January 1 each year. I scurry around trying to tie up all the loose ends of the Old Year before I turn my life upside down and shake it to start January 1 with a clean slate.

This year was one of new beginnings - I left my job while my husband returned to his. I started spending more time on my writing, and took a writing class which was exciting and enlightening. My son and daughter in law moved from Florida to Texas, and promptly embarked upon the ultimate fresh start - a new baby, our grandson Connor, who was born on November 14.

Although there weren't a lot of things in 2011 that need erasing, the idea of starting fresh is still very appealing. Brand new years inspire the kind of shake up I used to do with my Etch-A-Sketch, the kind that wipes away all the messiness and ugliness of the year gone by. Clean pages on the calendar spark ideas for ways to fill them with satisfying experiences,

I want 2012 to be a year of more new beginnings. I want to find my way into more creative outlets, especially musical ones. We hope to move to a new home in 2012, a major undertaking that we've put off for our entire adult lives and one that is long overdue. I want to be excited about that, and embrace the idea of this change with enthusiasm and positive energy.

There is likely to be sadness and loss during 2012. When you reach our stage of life, it seems almost inevitable. But I hope whatever losses do come are tempered with enough joy to make them bearable.

On this last weekend of 2011, I hope you are reflecting on the positive elements of this past year, and looking forward with eager anticipation to new challenges and experiences in the year ahead.

Go ahead - shake it up and turn it over.

Clean Slate.

Why Write Another Christmas Story?

If you were raised in the Christian tradition, there's really only one Christmas story - the tiny baby born in a lowly manger who grows up to be a Savior. But we all have a Christmas story of our own, and while it may never become the stuff of legend it might be  important to understanding who you are as a person and as a writer.

My childhood Christmases were idyllic. Although I'm an only child, I had many cousins who lived nearby, so our quiet, family-of-three centered Christmas mornings turned into huge extended family blowouts on Christmas afternoon and evening. The day was chock full of fun, food, presents, and all around excitement.

Years have passed, my cousins are scattered hither and yon and holidays have sometimes been lonely for this only child (who married an only child and raised an only child!)  I started dwelling on loss during the holidays, rather than on possibilities. I found myself thinking too much about what used to be, rather than appreciating what was, or looking forward to what could be. As a result, I sometimes dreaded the holiday, found only darkness in it, rather than hope or light.

But our Christmas story changed  in a big way this year, thanks to the birth of a baby - our six week old grandson. Hope was born again, so Christmas this year - though not the huge festive event of my childhood - regained a similar sense of excitement and anticipation.

Our writing stories might undergo similar transformations during the course of our lives. We get stuck in cycles, afraid to try new things, afraid to take risks. We lose the joy in putting words on the page, are unable to anticipate the finished product, or plan for the future. Like so many of my Christmases past, writing becomes stale and unproductive, something to dread rather than time to look forward to.

Creative stories can be rewritten, just as Christmas stories can. Like my grandson's birth, new inspiration arrives or new success infuses your writing with hope, making it sparkle and shine again, giving it a renewed sense of purpose.

May you find that for your writing life this season.

What's your Christmas story? Does it impact your writing life in any way?