Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

I’m grinding out words already.

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The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

When I get on a tear, 500 words is nothing – I tend to write more than that per day anyway, on various things and to various people. The challenge there is “getting on a tear.” When I’m writing, I usually have something to say (that’s why I’m writing, right?) and I tend to try to say it. That means that for this entry, I’ve already said what I felt I needed to say:

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

Since I’ve already said what I wanted to have said for this post, everything else is a grind – I’m basically rehashing what I’ve already said, expanding, fleshing out. It’s like writing an Amplified Bible or something, where every word has alternate meanings or synonyms – writing by thesaurus.

It goes against most of the habits I’ve tried to develop, habits against chasing rabbits for the sake of chasing rabbits.

I don’t mind the freedom to go into more depth, to be sure – in some ways, I find writing for the web constrictive, because I don’t think very simply in the first place. So my natural writing style would be fluid and verbose, as I describe a pattern, then try to click it into place around a theme to make a point.

But the web doesn’t work that way; people scan, they don’t look for patterns. So for the web, I write more directly, I try to pull out the themes and points, and use that instead of my natural form of communication or description.

So what happens here is that I start with my thesis statement – my theme – and work from there as usual, and I try to flesh it out as if someone were to be interested in it (also as usual), and then… I find myself running out of steam around 400 words. Every time. I’m at … this is word 370, and I am now reaching.

The other side of the challenge is the duration not of the writing, but the challenge itself. Thirty-one days, straight, is a lot. I could see “every weekday for a month” as being a lot easier, honestly, because you’d have the downtime of knowing you had those days off to recharge or observe, to build something that could be written about.

But the nature of the challenge is to avoid that. The nature of the challenge to me is that I honestly want to try to publish every day – here – in addition to whatever else I may write. (I’ve published at least five other things during the time I’ve been on the challenge so far, on other sites.) But I want to build traffic up here, too, and part of that is having content.

Hopefully I’ll succeed at the challenge – and hopefully I’ll see more traffic, too.

Working on each thread

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I had a disturbing dream last night, one in which I purposefully spilled milk onto a counter while preparing a bowl of cereal. It was a dream, so I’m not entirely sure what my logic was, but I think it was something like trying to make sure the milk was okay before pouring the cereal, even though I don’t remember any cereal being part of the dream.

It was not an especially happy dream.

The dream itself – the milk sequence – disturbs me in a lot of really small ways.

I don’t like spilled milk; it’s not the purpose of the milk.

I don’t like making a mess intentionally – did the dream version of myself have no other way to test the milk? Why not pour it into the sink, or a glass, or a bowl? Instead, my dream’s avatar created something that would have to be cleaned up specifically and deliberately (and quickly, too, because it was a kitchen counter that people would presumably use.)

What is the significance of the milk? Why was there no cereal? I don’t remember any cereal in the dream, only that the cereal was my purpose. (It was unachieved, too; I never got my dream cereal.)

Logically, at some point I’ll have to stop worrying about it (or even thinking about it – it’s not actually a big deal to me, it just stuck out as a memory when I woke up.) But the process of thinking about it strikes me as worthwhile, too.

We have to judge all the time. When we see something that catches our attention, we have the blessed facility to evaluate it: is it correct? Is it just? Is it godly? Is it interesting?

The process of judgement is consuming. When you see something, you react; that judgement is crucial to how you react, and when.

There are lots of abuses of this, too. Read Facebook, and you see it all the time: people post triggers constantly, often with good intent, but those triggers rely on judgements that you can’t actually make without investigation. Look deeper, and you find mitigations, things that alter the scenario enough that the trigger is no longer valid. Sometimes the reaction ends up being the opposite of what it was: we go from wishing something hadn’t happened to wishing it had happened sooner, or with more harsh results.

Look at my dream: it’s just milk, and it’s not even real milk. It’s dream milk. It’s 0% milk.

But I’ve spent at least fifteen minutes thinking about that milk and what it might mean (or might have meant) trying to chase the threads it presents, trying to understand myself and an irrational presentation my subconscious gave me (and, for some reason, preserved).

Is that time well-spent? I doubt it – unless you consider that I managed to write something about it as the sole justification for the dream’s memory. I don’t know that I think it was worthwhile, but I will try to make it worthwhile.

Building Habits

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When I think of habits, I tend to think positively, which may surprise people who think I’m a cynic.

I’m not a cynic; I’m an idealist, which means that I tend to be disappointed because my idealism wants a better reality than reality itself can provide.

So when I think of habits, my initial thought is of something positive, something done that is beneficial. I have a habit of doing the dishes when they need to be done, for example. (This statement is a wish, not a fact – but it’d be a good habit for me to have, and it’s one I’m trying to form.)

I’m in the middle of trying to maintain a standard of behavior for myself such that things like the dishes become positive habits. The list of things I’m trying to actually stay on top of on a daily basis are:

  • Dishes
  • Dirty clothes
  • Prayer
  • Writing (which is part of what this post is, as a participation in a “31 days” challenge)
  • Exercise (which is what I’m doing most poorly with – I’m exercising, but not regularly enough)

Regular things – i.e., not daily, but often, maybe weekly things – include:

  • Floors
  • Bathrooms
  • Updates on various sites I’m involved with (records of things that caught my eye, for example)

I don’t know how that last group is going to make it to the level of “habit.” They’re just not happening often enough to build a pattern of behavior. I have to remember to do all of these, but for the daily things it’s just a matter of responding to a stimulus as it happens; for the others, I have to make a commitment.

A reminder can help: “It’s Tuesday, clean the bathroom!” But that’s easy to ignore. I can easily tell myself that I’ll clean it around noon, for example, if the notification is given at eight a.m., and that’s easy to forget or delay further… with the result that I don’t do what I intended to do.

That’s not good.

I need to work harder on following all of these… maybe my regular chores need to be daily, as well, just checked daily. I walk by our bathrooms every day (at least!) – if it’s not clean, well, why not clean it then? In that sense, my regular “habits” become daily habits – losing the quotes – and they actually have the chance to graduate into regular things from which I and my family can benefit.

I don’t think any of it’s especially easy, and it can be grating to always feel reactive about these things. But on the other hand, being reactive (“I woke up; that’s the instigator for prayer”) means that it’s easy to know when to do specific things, and it also means that those things are taken care of.

That’s a good thing. I can live with that.

It’s why I think the Bible says to do things daily – it also builds up those habits as positive actions, and when done on a habitual basis, they gain the power of a lot of force for good.

31 Days Challenge

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I’ve decided to join Jeff Goins‘ 31 Day Challenge, in which he challenges writers to write 500 words every day for thirty-one days. It’ll be interesting; you’re supposed to write 500 words every day, without editing, and for me that would lead to a lot of really incoherent ramblings. I guess I’ll try to edit less, maybe, since editing while I write is an ingrained habit.

The challenge is not going to be in the writing itself, the challenge will be in the discipline to do it every day for thirty-one days. Rambling is easy; recording it and making it coherent and representative is not. (I write a lot of things that expose things about myself, where I use those things to reflect and repair. Most of my writing seems to be “things that are wrong with me that I need to fix.”)

So is this a journal? No, I don’t think so. This site isn’t really a journal, and the things I write that are explicitly to myself need to remain private, of course… and if you think I ramble here, you should see the tangled spaghetti thoughts that get recorded in my journals. I don’t know that I’d call it villainy, but a hive, yes, jumping from topic to topic with very few connections and little sense.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been a good blogger – I write fairly well, I think, but I also write formally and impersonally. I think I present some decent insights, but because I wall myself off, I don’t have the warm, empathetic approach that people seem to want.

I don’t even want to have that warm approach. It’s not who I am. I’m not especially friendly; I’m rather prickly. I keep people at arm’s length, typically, and strangers especially are at arm’s length… and going from “stranger” to “associate” (or even further, to “friend”) is a long journey, protected by shotgun, attack dog, and landmine.

I don’t think that’s especially healthy, honestly, but it’s the truth. I know it’s a problem; it affects my daily life, too. But it’s who I am, and I’m not going to lie to people and say “Look how friendly I am, look how fuzzy I can be,” without actually being friendly or fuzzy. I’d rather have a commitment to truth and honesty.

That way, if people do feel that they know me, they have a chance of honestly knowing me, at least to the degree they understand.

That’s the basis on which I’d like to have relationships; they’re honest, they’re real, they’re based on a valid assumption of distance.

The challenge – the five hundred words per day that instigated this post – will be fascinating, because while I can easily write more than five hundred words, writing five hundred words consistently on a specific topic, without chasing rabbits, is going to be hard on some days.

But I guess that’s part of building that habit, and if it’s a challenge I’m going to accept, I’m going to give it my best shot.