A Thought Experiment

Earth can absorb a defined amount of carbon every year. What if everyone on Earth had equity in that carbon? Each person could use their share or sell their share. If someone wanted to use more than their share, they would have to find someone willing to sell their carbon equity. Let's dream a few lives.

Letsha lives in Lesotho in a traditional one-room hut. When people first approached to buy her unused carbon equity, she couldn't believe it. It took several weeks for the strange foreigners to show their good faith. Now she shows visitors the solar panel that lets her charge her phone and do a little reading at night. She has a new stove, too, that takes less wood to cook. She and her neighbors record and share traditional songs and download new ones to sing together.

"Always I have been part of the earth, and now other people see it. My heart is full," she says. Besides the improvements to her home, she has sent her daughter and her son to school.

Carl and Livia have a large house in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. As we watches a team installing solar panels on his roof, Carl grumbles, "The carbon payments are killing me. It's actually cheaper to put up these panels than to keep buying credit." Livia chimes in, "They are very ugly, but it's just good sense. At least we aren't the only house in the neighborhood with them." In fact, almost half the homes have added panels since the equity plan went in, and another team is working to install more down the block.

Magali and Guiseppe run a small family vineyard in southern France. "The equity payment, bien sûr, it was expensive to start. Year by year, we make improvements. Now is not so bad." They have added a windmill on the slope above the vines. Parts of the home date to the 1500s, so the walls are thick and naturally insulated. They replaced the oil furnace with a heat pump and have revived traditional methods of crushing the grapes and returning the pressings to the soil. "A little slower and our neighbors help. And the wine, you taste the feet in it. Is so rich." They offer you a glass, and sit with you to watch the shadows of the vines lengthen. You have a delicious and abundant evening.

I believe we are all in this together and that we can live well on a neutral carbon budget.

Why Don't I Eat More Vegan Food?

I talked a few posts back about the reasons I'd like to eat more vegan food: health, environment, flavor, adventure. When I wrote about systems for eating, that implied that one reason I wasn't eating more vegan food is that I didn't have a vegan cooking system.

I'm still mulling and brainstorming on that.

Meanwhile, let's look at some of the other reasons I don't eat all vegan meals for clues to eating more of them.

Some reasons are other facets of needing a system: inconvenience, lack of knowledge, old habits. If I had a system, it would include making some vegan meals easily, knowing their recipes by heart, and having the habit of including vegan meals on a regular basis.

Then there are health concerns. Doug, my husband, is diabetic. I like to cook food that helps him regulate his blood sugar. Our best results so far have been with a low-glycemic diet that tightly limits grains, potatoes, and other starchy vegetables. This makes a lot of vegan recipes problematic. When I read vegan recipes for rice bowls, polenta dishes, pasta, stuffed potatoes and shepherd's pies, or even sandwiches, they frequently look far too glycemic to serve to him. Our experiments have seen him doing well with spaghetti squash or broccoli as a pasta substitute. Small amounts of homemade, whole-grain bread also seem fine for him.

We are accustomed to generous quantities of protein, and "not enough protein" can be a concern with vegetarian or vegan diets. Although we are in no danger of kwashiorkor, we feel better with protein in our meals. How much of that is biologically optimal and how much of it is custom and changeable, I don't know. We made a large batch of lobia (with olive oil rather than ghee) from Urvashi Pitre, and ate it lunch and dinner for several days, along with our usual vegan breakfasts. After the last meal, I said, "It doesn't feel like we've been eating vegan." Aha! A clue. This is a fairly high protein vegan dish, with both the black-eyed peas and spinach contributing. So it's possible that the feeling of eating vegan comes from getting less protein than I am used to, and if so, keeping the protein up could help vegan food feel more sustaining. Our experiments around Doug's blood sugar led us to meals with about 30% calories from protein in them for him. Vegan meals run lower than that on average. It's easy to include enough protein to avoid protein deficiency. There is not yet a consensus on how much protein an optimal diet includes, and there is some evidence that the optimal diet varies widely from person to person. So we might be able to adapt our diet to run higher in protein, like the lobia recipe does, or we might be able to adapt to less protein, as some very healthy traditional diets contain.

Another reason is comfort: eating the food I grew up with feels supportive. If I feel ill or stressed, I often crave my childhood favorites. I've made some progress on leaving the ground beef and cheese out of the burritos from our family table. I gave up cheese with few pangs when I stopped digesting milk well. We spent some years mixing half TVP into our taco meat, and trying ground chicken, pork, or turkey instead of beef, and it tastes better to us now that way. The burrito recipe always contained refried beans, and the vegan ones taste better to me. On the last version, I tried adding corn kernels and sunflower seeds to the refried bean filling to round out the protein and add some fat to satisfy my expectations for a burrito. With plenty of seasoning and salsa, I found that comforting. Adding avocado makes any burrito more appealing, too! Matching the protein and fat content I'm accustomed to may make vegan food more comforting as well as less glycemic.

Typing out these thoughts has given me some good ideas. I can see why people want paleo vegan recipes. Their high-protein emphasis might solve some problems for us.

A System for Vegan Eating

At last writing, I was looking forward to the release of I Can Cook Vegan. It's here! I've read it, but haven't yet made any recipes.

The recipes look great and Isa's writing is entertaining as always. Still, I realized there was something I was hoping for from it that I didn't get: a system for composing vegan meals.

I've had, since I was very young, a guideline for composing dinner. It's my mom's ideal, and it is practically reflexive with me: a protein, a starch, a hot vegetable, and a cold vegetable. I've expanded what fits in those categories over the years. The great carb controversies have left me often using beans as the starch where in previous decades that slot went to potatoes, rice, bread, and other grain dishes. Cold vegetable usually means salad. And some meals bring all these pieces together, such as my lentil stew which has lentils in quantity to cover both the protein and the starch, and vegetables enough to cover both servings.

Even with the flexing I've done to that formula over the years, it shapes most of the meals I make. And it causes me to stumble sometimes when I want to plan a vegan meal.

Look at that lentil stew! It's a lovely, warm, filling meal, and it's also an awkward fit to protein-starch-veg-veg.

Time to throw out protein-starch-veg-veg? Time to make a different archetype for my meals? I'm not sure yet.

But my mind is on systems, and I have a feeling something tasty is on its way.

What Do We Eat?

Around three times a day, I decide to eat something. That's a lot of decisions! And that means I have several chances to make a difference with my food choices each day.

There are lots of reasons to choose among food options. Isa Chandra Moskowitz has a new book coming out. I read the preview, and in it she has a list of people who might like the book. The list includes new cooks, farmer's market fans, and people who want to improve their health or be kind to animals among others. One category she didn't include, which is an important concern for me, is people who want their food choices to reduce climate change.

Just that list shows how complex eating can be! That's why Michael Pollan wrote an entire book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. What to eat when you could eat a wide variety of foods does pose a confusing set of questions.

One way we deal with complex choices is to follow a default. Changing a daily action from something we debate over into a habit saves a lot of energy. So we may eat as our mothers fed us, or fall into a routine of restaurants and convenience food, or have a weekly menu that determines we have curry on Mondays and tacos on Tuesdays and so on.

But, if we are taking a look at our eating and making a new plan for it, how do we choose?

In essence, what are our food values?

That's a beautiful question, and one I could spend an entire book answering. Quickly, I know that I value food that I enjoy, that improves my health, that grows sustainably and contributes to my mission of helping the human game continue.

Meanwhile, I have ordered I Can Cook Vegan, as I order most of Isa's books, because she is an entertaining writer and creative cook whose recipes help me eat better. I'm looking forward to its release!

Defining Mastery

Have you been following the debate about mastery?

It isn't trending on Twitter or broadcast on CNN. In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell proposed that those who excel have spent 10,000 hours on deliberate practice. That means that anyone can achieve mastery if they spend about ten years attentively improving a skill twenty hours per week.

What an exciting result! He had data and put it together in memorable, surprising words. It's a beautiful insight into human progress. If you ever start thinking we aren't getting any wiser, spend a little while considering that the 10,000 hour concept arrived only 11 years ago, has spread well, and lays out a path for becoming much better at any chosen skill. That means that we now know how to create better results for anyone — which meets my definition of us becoming wiser.

Since then, people have been testing the 10,000 hour concept. They haven't disproved it so much as refined it, finding situations where it might take more or less time, looking for exceptions, and so on. (More advances in wisdom!)

On my own part, I've had mixed feelings about mastery. On the one hand, how lovely it would be to master a skill! On the other hand, I am broadly curious and enjoy spreading my attention between many subjects and pursuits — which means any single one may not receive enough of my time for me to reach mastery in it. When is it worth immersion in a single activity to bring it to mastery? What other uses of my time would I give up to gain mastery? These are worthwhile questions.

In the meantime, I needed to understand what mastery was. So I've been working on a definition, checking the words and rolling it around in my mind, and settling on this:

Mastery is fast, nuanced response to specific situations.

For example, suppose it's the guitar you want to master. Then a sign of mastery would be playing quickly, with variety in tone, volume, technique, matching the particular song and group you are playing with.

In martial arts, it's reflexive attacks, parries, and dodges that meet a particular opponent and their moves with the appropriate amount of force.

In coaching, it is seeing the person before you and choosing in the moment from a wide variety of responses to help that person move ahead.

A master doesn't always have to respond quickly, carefully adjusted for the current circumstances. But if someone can't, they are not showing mastery in that moment.

I'm open to debate on this! And one part is that I needed something more specific than "performing well."

Bonus definition, extracted from dictionary.com: Wisdom is "knowledge of what is true or right, coupled with just judgment as to action." I'd say wisdom is both knowing how to do something and choosing well what to do. And the 10,000 hour concept helps someone both know how to gain mastery and choose whether gaining mastery is worth it.

I Will Mess Up

Today I was watching a thread where John Scalzi commented on the Hugo for An Archive of Our Own and then apologized.

He's one of the good guys. He's a little younger than I am, far more engaged in public discussion of how to treat women and people of color well in the community of science fiction than I have ever been, and has a lot of experience with being a public figure. If he's going to misspeak at times, I definitely am too. Unless I stop speaking altogether, and that isn't good for me or likely to make the world better.

It is better than I engage and try than sit silent to avoid error. So I am going to mess up.

It's quite a relief to accept that, actually. It's also a relief to see Cory Doctorow arguing that neither our good actions nor our bad actions cancel out the others. We are imperfect. We act from what we know now. Some of it will be mistakes, or perhaps ignorant errors that will make future generations or even more alert contemporaries cringe.

I, in particular, have come with blind spots and upbringing and imperfect knowledge and I will mess up.

I'm human. The game is to keep trying to do better.

Creating a Better Self

Atomic Habits is an outstanding book. It is clearly written, inspiring, actionable, and insightful. It contains information that is new to me – and I have read many books on self-development over many years – and states those ideas in a way that feels like I could do something with them. I want to do something with them! I very highly recommend it.

I'm restarting it, to incorporate more of the suggestions, and today I was struck by the identity concepts. "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." Isn't that beautifully stated? And it's central: who do I want to become? What goals would that person have? What habits would she practice to reach those goals and to express the person she is?

One of my very first posts here was that I am more of a net than an arrow. That was an identity statement. I believe I am a generalist. I like to spread my efforts among multiple goals. I enjoy having more than one focus for my attention, over the course of a day, over the course of a week, over the course of months or years, or over the course of a lifetime. However, all these statements are identities, and I could change them.

Here's another meta-belief: I believe that the likeliest way to change a value is to adhere more strongly to a higher value. In a class recently, someone asked me if my values had changed. It's an excellent question. I stopped and reviewed my history.

There is a bias for humans to think we thought the same way in the past that we think now. We don't remember how we thought before we changed our minds without an extra effort to do so. Knowing this, I looked first at how my behavior had changed, which is easier to observe. And I could see: I used to have a much stronger belief in having everyone follow the same rules than I have now. I've gained a value for diversity that now ranks higher than what I might previously have called a value for equal application of the rules.

That may be because I have a higher value for kindness, for treating humans well, than I have for fairness. Or it may be because I now spend more time around people who value diversity than people who value lawfulness.

When I made a mission statement, that was a clarifying effort to discover and enhance what is most important to me. In many ways, it was a discovery or creation or strengthening of identity.

James Clear, in Atomic Habits, inspired me to take the next step and ask, "What frequent actions would someone who valued this mission take?" I can think of a few. And I'll write more about them another day.

Building up Practices

While it irritates me to have too many practices dictated to me, especially when they are all supposed to happen "first thing in the morning," there are things I'd like to get done. So I've been trying to improve my habits.

One hack in the kit is to chain practices. Only one can happen first thing, but it could lead to another, and another, and another. Then another could happen, say, just after breakfast, and it could lead into another.

I had a few good days of chaining four practices before breakfast, then breakfast leading into three more daily practices – four if I count brushing my teeth.

Then I had a horrible backlash.

This is normal.

With all these practices in rubble around me, I have a good chance to review them, decide what is really important to me, and which ones were really helping.

I feel some urgency. I've had a couple minor but continuing health concerns that would yield to better self-care. And with Doug and I both out of work, I see a date when our savings will run out that gives me a deadline that feels heavy. So it does feel like very slow addition of practices, which I would normally recommend, isn't sufficient to meet current needs.

Slow additions would reduce those backlashes.

Nonetheless, here I go again.

I Feel Better about Myself When I Write

I've been working on re-establishing some of the good work procedures I had in place before we moved. It's surprising how many of them were made easier by the surroundings I had carefully set up in my home, which was also my office. I've set my laptop up in a smaller, less central place (as Stephen King mentions doing in On Writing) and made a variety of other adjustments to my space and schedule, and I've been getting into the book and making progress on it much more regularly than I was two weeks ago.

That feels better. I say kinder words to myself when I am writing, and say fewer unkind things. I feel in accordance with my work in the world, and feel like I am serving. I have a sense of accomplishment upon completing even a paragraph that outweighs the accomplishment of spending hours on more laborious actions like massive housecleaning or someone else's editing.

While he was writing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (a work which has my highest recommendation), Eliezar Yudkowsky talked about how writing an immense fanfic might seem a quixotic use of his skills. Then he sent us to a comic of which the punchline was, "I tried not doing it, and that didn't work." There we go. I've tried not writing. It doesn't work.

Whether that's because writing itself is the necessary action or because my current writing project is on the critical path to the difference I want to make in the world remains to be seen.

Marcus Buckingham gives a revisionist definition of strengths and weaknesses. He says that a strength is what strengthens you and a weakness is what weakens you. This is an interesting change of perspective on the more usual understanding that a strength is what you are good at and a weakness is what you find difficult. His definition is completely uncorrelated, at least to start, with the standard definition. Over time, it seems likely that practicing what strengthens you will also give you skill in it.

In either definition, writing is one of my strengths.

Deep Frying

French fries. Doughnuts. Fried chicken. Some of the most crave-able, iconically American foods are deep-fried.

When we lived in Bend, there was a man who was an absolute artist with a deep fryer. I just checked reviews and Hardy is still making wings and burgers. Deep-frying is an art, and it can create wonderfully hot food with rich flavor.

And at some point I decided I would not deep-fry at home. It takes a lot of oil, a deep pan, a thermometer or the experience to judge the heat of the oil, and it spatters grease. I could trim a set of equipment and a body of learning and an extra cleaning project from my life and lean into someone else's skills. When I have a relatively infrequent desire for deep-fried food, I let someone else make it.

In miniature, this is an example of what it looks like to specialize. Others deep-fry well. I let them. I buy their art when I want it. We are both better off.

I'm glad to be a member of a civilization where someone else can do the deep-frying.

The Treasure Hour

Here's a partial list of actions that various authorities have recommended I do first thing in the morning:

• Meditate
• Check blood sugar
• Drink a quart of water
• Write down my dreams
• Write a morning pages brain dump
• Practice yoga or stretch
• Visualize a safe zone
• Practice gratitude
• Drink water with lemon or vinegar
• Make the bed
• Eat 
• Fast
• Sing
• Step into the sunlight
• Blog
• Work on a book
• Check my to-do list
• Write my to-do list
• Look myself in the eyes in the mirror and say, "I love you."

My cats, of course, think my first action should be to feed them.

Only one action can be my first. The high competition among the possibilities suggests there is a lot of power in that first action. It's the one most likely to happen. It comes when I have willpower available and it sets the tone for the day. I have chosen several of these and continued them for months or years – sometimes, I've even set up a series of first actions arranged into a morning routine and continued that an extended period without a break.

I broke the string of my daily first actions when we moved. Since then, I haven't re-established a consistent first-in-the-morning priority. I do better when I have one. The feeling of accomplishment, and the molding of my life into a chosen form, gives me a boost. I start each day as a success, and that helps in many ways, some more obvious than others.

At this point, it seems rude to me for anyone else to decide what I do with that treasured first hour of my morning. I've heard a lot of arguments for competing priorities. Now it's mine to judge and feel my way into the choice that is best for me.

So I offer the same consideration to you. It may improve your life to choose and stick to one practice as the first action of the morning. To keep it for one week is a good foot in the water and for three months is a very solid trial.

What would you like to be the first thing you do each morning?

Mindset

Saturday, while playing video games, I became curious about why I like this.

Of course there are colors and movement and story. All those items are give me pleasure, yet I am barely attracted to watching television. A recent theme of several personal growth teachings I've encountered is that we seek a feeling when we choose our goals and activities. So, how does playing games on my phone make me feel?

I feel competent, engaged, focused, and happy. No wonder I seek this activity and its feeling out. The games I like best feature frequent leveling, many small goals that I need to apply a little strategy to achieve, and rewards for achieving them. They often have some humor to make me smile. There's some competition against other players (which is the most challenging mode of play since humans remain more creative and flexible and insightful than game algorithms) but not so much that if I don't go all out to win that I will fall behind. Games where only those who spend the most receive any rewards quickly turn me off. And there's a small (but again, not critical) social element so I can cooperate with others.

In short, the games I like create an ideal work environment for me.

Here's the next question: could I maintain that feeling state while playing life? I've found that question productive already.

Bias

Today we played Bias Jeopardy at a class at the unemployment office.

As a veteran of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, as well as someone who interned at Decision Research in the 1980s and has kept up with the field, I did well at it. Plus, poker tends to illuminate a good number of them.

All the categories were types of biases and all the answers were specific biases chosen from a list we had names and definitions for in advance. All in all, we had a good time becoming more familiar with them.

I do recommend studying biases. It's fun, and helps make better decisions. I suspect a human cannot become entirely bias-free – there are too many, and we have inherited a legacy of fast, imperfect decision-making. Yet each one known gains a little more freedom and accuracy. And those benefits add up.

I Read Four Books Today

They were short and gripping. Django Wexler's YA series The Forbidden Library is remarkably adept and thoughtful. I admired the craftsmanship even as I rushed to see what happened next. I recommend these.

Not everyone can read four books in a day, even if the rest of the day's activities are limited, of course. Speed reading is a very high leverage skill. I recommend it as well.

I borrowed all four volumes from the library. I am very thankful for the library. The first two I had in ebook, then Doug and I went downtown to pick up the remaining two in print.

I couldn't bring myself to work today. Tomorrow I hope will be better. I did walk some, drink water, and eat decent food. I am starting my daily cooldown after this post, and that will help me have more will tomorrow.

Alma-individuality

I enjoy English's word creation features. We have a powerful, adaptable language. When I look to the future, I imagine that someday we'll have a language that holds more reflection of the world, more easily. That process already happens – for example, "fractal" is in the lyrics of "Let It Go" from the Disney movie Frozen. It captures in one word the branching and rebranching at smaller levels of Elsa's ice forms.

The book I'm currently working on helps overwhelmed environmentalists find actions they can take to reduce carbon emissions. One of the concepts I explore is that different solutions suit different people, due to their circumstances, passions, budget, and so on. My first draft called such a unique set of personal traits "alma-individuality." It's a parallel coinage from "bio-individuality," the well-observed uniqueness of physical traits that influence how medical treatments work. One dose doesn't fit all, due to differences in weight, activity level, sensitivities, and many more aspects of human bodies. "Bio" comes from the Greek word for life. I knew "alma" from the phrase "alma mater" used to describe one's university, which I'd seen defined as "mother of the soul." So I used alma-individuality to mean "soul uniqueness." However, taking a quick look now, it seems "alma" actually derives from Latin for "nourishing" or "kind." Drat.

Well, it was quite a mouthful, and I admit I was fond of it. It rolls nicely off my tongue: alma-individuality, alma-individuality. Looks like "nous-individuality" or "psyche-individuality" would have correct roots. I do not take to either of them as well.

Oddly, I suspect other authors have made this same confusion about "alma" meaning "soul." Seems like William Morris or some symbolist fantasist used Alma to name a character who represented the soul.

Now I need to fix this in the rewrite. A couple of my beta readers tagged "alma-individuality" as cumbersome, which is fair. This is one of those cases where a writer, in this case me, needs to let go of bits she is fond of that aren't truly serving the work. I'm considering "soulprint." Possibly individuality, as is, or uniqueness would work. They will all require some reworking of sentences, which will probably be for the best, eventually.

Good new terms, like fractal, make us smarter. Alma-individuality, alas, probably only complicates something that could be clearer and shorter, no matter how much I like to say it.

Alma-individuality, alma-individuality.

Musings for Myself

One of the reasons I started blogging again is that Rohan Rajiv, at alearningaday.blog, divided blogs into ones for oneself and ones for the world. I found a lot of freedom in deciding to blog for myself. I let go of sticking to a single topic, worrying about what other people would think, trying for good SEO, and other aspects of writing a blog intended to grab the world's attention.

Of course, I am still respectful in public. I have a care for saying only what I wouldn't mind if the world heard about. Words on the Internet are permanent, to some degree, anyway. And I have principles – I prefer not to use a private forum to be meaner than I'd be in public, anyway.

Another reason I began blogging is that moving thoughts from my head to somewhere more visible heals me. Writers save ourselves, too.

It's an interesting tension, between speaking and being kind, sometimes. I think the world is full of such tensions, and the middle ground between them is the most creative section of the common garden. That's one reason why my name is Paradox.

I can even let go of crafting well-formed essays in each posting.

Here's another day. In no particular order, I've recently been thinking about:

Seanan McGuire, and how Charlaine Harris called her intelligent, and it surprised me, because I think of all authors as intelligent, generally, so what about Seanan McGuire brought that up in particular? She certainly has a strong grasp of science. Her worlds are congruent – the world-building in Every Heart a Doorway, for example, shows attention to the second and third order effects of the laws of that universe. She also is willing to question tropes. And reuse them in fresh ways. And her writing continues to improve – her prose is more graceful, her stories seem more individual, she says new things about her worlds and lets her characters grow. Continuous improvement suggests self-reflection and attention to her work as well as the vast amount of practice she puts in. Yes, all of that could call another writer to remark upon her intelligence. I would have remarked on her passion and sheer volume of work first.

Doug has been reading to me out of Atomic Habits. James Clear creates some memorable sentences that recapsulate existing knowledge to make it more actionable. That is good writing.

I do like the more even day/night lengths of living closer to the equator. Somewhat less humidity serves me, too. Yet this climate is more inviting to walk outside in – yes, even in the rain, which I find soft – and that may outweigh those benefits. We shall see.

Bellingham

Doug and I are finding Bellingham nurturing and beautiful. We've been warned that people who come here often don't want to leave. Like Eugene, Oregon, where we first went to college, many graduates want to stay. This fills up the entry-level jobs and then... they start looking for other creative contributions to make to the economy. The result is lots of restaurants and funky handcrafted businesses. Bellingham is in full flower with breweries and brewpubs -- more than 30 in a town of about 80,000. Midland had zero, probably because local law didn't encourage them. Or maybe because the brewpub culture had never taken hold. 

Doug likes hearing seagulls here. There are fir and birch trees growing thickly along the road. The birch, especially, gives me the strange sensation of nostalgia for that one short vacation we took in Finland. Because we expected to find work in Seattle, our storage unit is in Lynnwood, a northern suburb of Seattle, about an hour and fifteen minutes from here. We like being close to our family here, and we like the town. We now look at job opportunities here as well as in Seattle. 

We are on the third floor of a condo complex. The stairs feel less of a stretch to me every day. I make a point of reaching the ground at least once a day. Our two cats have been surprisingly mellow about no longer going out – when we lived in Midland, Banichi moped if he couldn't go outside. So far, the balcony plus the hallway a small ways outside the condo have been enough for him. 

The water is very good here. Doug has a glass teakettle. It has remained pristinely clear for multiple weeks here. In Midland, the water would leave a deposit every single boil. And that's after we ran it through a reverse osmosis system. 

All in all, it is good to be here. With our own place, a new network of friends, and our work systems rebuilt, we'd be better off here than in Midland, for sure. 

Writers Save Each Other

I borrowed No Time to Spare, Ursula LeGuin's collection of essays from her blog, from the library. This helped me, too. In it, I found she had gained the desire to blog from another writer, José Scaramago, with whom I was previously unacquainted. His work did her good.

I've lost track of how many writers appreciate Stephen King for On Writing. We bless Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, for showing how to take writing one step at a time. We read each other's blogs – Neil Gaiman and Wil Wheaton kept my soul alive through dark days – and tweets – Laurell K. Hamilton is constantly showing in public that the work is what you do, day after day. I revere Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit for the grace of the words and the deep, kind acceptance in it. John Scalzi and Steven Barnes teach us to respect others – and in the end, that lets us respect ourselves, too.

Writers save each other. I particularly know the science fiction community, where I first felt at home, and where there is a long history of gathering and fandom and helping each other out. I am the most minor shade of "pro" yet that peer group has shaped me substantially in directions that I value. The breathing community of shared words is profound and transformative.

If a writer's word reach someone who isn't a writer, they may help, and they are less likely to come back. Sometimes the reflection from another writer is exactly what I need. And yes, I am a writer.

Better Today

Today felt lighter when I woke up. I've had a productive morning, taken a couple steps that loomed too massive to attempt on the last few days. It's good to get some things done.

I don't really know how much of feeling better comes from the ways I worked to take care of myself and how much comes from time passing. I wouldn't try the experiment of not taking care of myself by choice. I don't recommend anyone else volunteer for it, either. Sounds unethical to me.

I am still tired earlier than say, in August. Continuing the self-care. Hope to take more useful steps tomorrow.

Be kind to yourself. Whatever you can do is a victory.

Another Day

I had hopes for today. Then, a fairly small emotional blow hit me, and I couldn't get started on my work again.

I'm trying to take the self-care steps that mean I will be able to work tomorrow. A little exercise, some decent food, plenty of water, kind thoughts about myself. There's an abyss where my slip leads to horribly unkind thoughts about myself. That doesn't help.

We did some housework, always useful. I read the blogs of a couple writers, which do show that the work is hard and if you want to succeed, you keep at it. I'm thinking about resilience, which is the ability to step up again after a setback. There it is again, the temptation to be unkind to myself that I wasn't as resilient as I'd like to be. Onward.

Tomorrow is another day. I do hope that I will complete more work and contribute to the world more tomorrow. I hope I will be kind to myself and the people around me. I hope good news and gentle weather will come my way.

Meanwhile, tonight I'll work to get a good night's sleep in my safe and warm lodgings, and rise tomorrow and try again.