Playing With Blocks

My friend Patti Digh (of the 37 Days blog and the book about what you would do if you knew you only had 37 days to live...I may have mentioned her once or twice) co-hosted a free telecoaching session the other evening entitled "Playing With Blocks." It was about the things that block us from doing the "important things," the life goals that we set for ourselves that are the most meaningful, the things we tend to put off while we are taking care of business. We all have them: the important things and the blocks.

I tried to convince myself that I didn't have to worry about the blocks anymore, now that I'm retired and have all the time I need to accomplish those "important things." I mean, it's just a matter of having enough time, isn't it? You can't do great things if you have a job, or a young family, or a sick dog, or "The Office" is on, or...well, you know. Lucky me, I have the time, no dog and no TV. Problem solved, right?

The blocks fall into three main categories:
1) False comparisons with Others
2) False expectations of Self
3) False investment in "The Story"

I didn't join the teleconference (and I haven't listened to the tape yet) but I know what those three things mean without having heard a word. You do, too, if you have an important thing that you can't seem to get around to doing.

Here's what happened to me today. I read in The Writer's Almanac:
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Vikram Seth, (books by this author) born in Calcutta, India (1952). Seth grew up in India, went to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and moved out to Northern California to study economics in graduate school. One day got fed up of entering numbers into a computer database. He walked into a bookstore and up to the poetry section. He pulled off the shelf Pushkin's novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Seth was so impressed and obsessed with the book that he decided to quit working on his master's thesis for a while and write his own novel in verse.

He never finished his graduate school economics project, but he did write that novel in verse, published in 1986 as The Golden Gate. Seth's native language is Hindi. He writes in English, and he's fluent in Mandarin and Urdu, Pakistan's national language. He's also studied Welsh, German, and French. He plays the cello and the Indian flute, and he sings German lieder. His most recent book is a work of nonfiction, Two Lives (2005), a love story about his Indian great uncle and German Jewish great aunt.

Now, I never said I wanted to be a great poet, but if I wanted to, let's say, write a novel in verse, reading this would have stopped me cold (see Block #1 above). What's worse is having a friend who wrote a terrific book and is coming out with a new one next year, and who is now teaching a class on how not to get blocked. I'm so bummed.

On to Block #2. If one wanted to, oh, I don't know, commit to writing a poem every day, but one didn't feel like writing a poem on Saturday, one might decide that one was no better than a slug, and therefore, not even try to write a poem on Sunday, or Monday, and then just give it up altogether.

I'm not even going to get into Block #3 because that is a story I'm sure you don't want to hear.

So let's just look at pictures of naked women, shall we? Greg and I went to the Seattle Summer Solstice Parade today and I took about a dozen pictures of painted naked people on bicycles. Some of them are even men. Enjoy.







At least these young ladies remembered to wear their helmets.