BODY AND MIND

One of the toughest things about being an artist is knowing what you have to do and want to do and not being able to do it. Tonight I am exhausted. My two year old hasn't slept a full night in about a month now. For some reason he's wide eyed and bushy tailed at three o'clock in the morning. He has never had a sleeping issue but lately he's just raring to go at 3:00 a.m. Often, I am compelled to bring him into bed with me just so that he doesn't wake my daughter down the hall and I'm left with two bushy tails at 3:00 a.m. So needless to say, I'm on my way to bed --- cannot write tonight. Nothing there. Nothing of quality anyway. Funny to me how interconnected the brain and body are. I think of people who put on a pot of coffee and stay up to write until all kinds of weird times in the morning. Now, I've done the coffee thing but unless I'm really feeling it, I can't go past 1:00, 1:30 the latest. And tonight is definately not one of those nights.


I find myself again, lamenting that I have not reached that stage of supporting myself from my art. Like most writers at this stage, I long for the day that I can write and teach writing (workshops) full time. I just imagine how pleasurable it must be to have one's day completely to one's self without having the tensions of this 9-5 grind. Now let me say from the outset that I consider myself very fortunate. I work from home so I don't have the pain of having to fight traffic and be in front of the watercooler by 8:59. I don't have the lurking boss problem or the chatty-cathy co-worker or the cubicle syndrome. THANK GOD! But I do have to give 8 hours of my day to an establishment and I have a problem with that. The other night my Y-factor (stole that from someone, isn't it neat?) and I were watching 60 minutes and we learned that in Kuwait the citizens are given subsidized housing, don't pay taxes, do not do manual labor (foreigners are imported to do that) and also --- get this! --- have a three hour workday! I was floored. They also have free healthcare. I'm not gonna touch that right now, that's the topic of another post. Three hour workday....can you believe it? I wouldn't know how to act! And then I think of we Americans who work on average a nine hour day with 1/2 - 1 hour lunch for five days per week, fifty two weeks out of the year. We Americans who give our women six weeks of maternity leave and then wonder why our children perform so poorly in schools and in life. The reality is that I am tired because I have the awesome task of working, child-rearing and writing all at once. I cannot give up on either right now. Childrearing I'm cool with. My kids are great (when they're sleeping) and I wouldn't trade being a mother for anything in the world. But this work thing ..... it sucks. I long for the ability to work at my passion full time and get off this merry go round. The one thing I plan to tell my children is to find and pursue their passions. I tell young people that I know now, "Look, you're gonna have to work for the rest of your life and if you have to drag your ass somewhere for the next fifty years, you better find something that you really, really enjoy or else you're going to have a really crappy existence." An associate of mine with two young daughters told me she wants her daughters to have careers. I told her I want my kids to be happy. I want them, above and beyond any amount of income or social status, to be happy. She told me "You can't pay bills with happiness." I told her to tell that to Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd, Martha Stewart, P-Diddy, Halle Berry ................ you get my drift don't you ? And I mention these people b/c none of them had silver spoons.

Anyhow, my brother called tonight and asked how the book is coming along. I told him about my goal of 7/1 and hearing myself say it and feeling how my body feels -- worn down, tired -- I became even more disgusted knowing that 7/1 is only three weeks away and if I don't get cracking I'm not even going to reach the 8/1 that I adjusted to. Oh the mind and the body. If there were a way to put the body to bed and keep the mind going to do the work it needs to do .....

It's eleven, I better get off of here. Maybe I'll get up at five and try. Maybe.