#29 - Creative Procrastination, Imitation, Self Education
How To Stay Positive When Your Partner Just Isn't | 20 One-Sentence Writing Truths
👋 Hello
This week I am sharing about Creative Procrastination, Imitation, Self Education, How To Stay Positive When Your Partner Just Isn't, and 20 One-Sentence Writing Truths
Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up here 👇
Experts from the book “Growing Without Schooling”
Creative Procrastination
Faced with large numbers of things to do, they delay doing things until they’ve had plenty of time to damn well feel like doing them. They delay until they’ve had time to plumb their subconscious on the subject, to look at all the alternatives, to question their assumptions, to fantasize about the subject, to sleep on it.
Writing
What one person’s words can, at best, do for another - We cannot give each other our experiences, but we can help each other to find new meanings from our own experiences. This is the true work of all serious writers and writing
Schooling
The ideal thing would be for children just to live - either alongside their parents or not, as they wished - and that this would be the best possible education. I always thought the best school was a library or perhaps a marketplace.
I now think the single idea which symbolizes best this new education is the idea of a large number of adults all committed to being accessible to questions from children about their field of endeavor. It occurs to me that I have learned a great deal from merchants in this way, and in any auto-parts store they’re prepared to educate in this fashion. Also hardware store, lumberyard, greenhouse, music stores.
Introspection
I think introspection is one of the great self-educational tools. One can be a scientist with one’s own subconscious, testing and probing by means of imaginatively placing oneself in a certain position and then asking, “How do I like (or dislike) that?” All you get, of course, is a reading of your feelings, but this leads to asking why one feels as one does, which in turn leads to identification of hidden experiences and implicit principles, which can then be questioned.
Imitation
Almost all the activities I have undertaken in life began with imitation. There was a time in adolescence when I even worried whether I had anything original to say or paint or play. But worrying did no good and I went ahead producing for my own gratification. Then later on I got a better perspective on the world and became aware that I was already pushing the limits in some things. How and when does imitation lead to originality? Why does some imitation always remain that?
The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams once said or wrote that when he was very young, studying composition with Maurice Ravel, he said to Ravel one day that he was worried because everything he wrote sounded like imitation Ravel. Ravel said in effect “Don’t worry about it, go right on imitating me, if you have anything original to say it will come out.” Which it did-Vaughan Willam’s later music sounds about as unlike Ravel’s as one could imagine.
Self Education
In this competitive world, what counts is the ability to teach oneself. Though we may seem to know a lot, we succeed because we start out by admitting our ignorance, and then setting out to overcome it.”
How To Stay Positive When Your Partner Just Isn't
First, pay attention to how your partner’s moods are affecting you
You could pause for a few seconds, acknowledge that you’re feeling annoyed and frustrated with your spouse, remind yourself that it’s okay and natural to feel that way, and then ask yourself what the most helpful way to move forward might be
Know that you can support your partner without taking on their negative emotions.
It’s possible to find a middle ground between getting swept up in their feelings and ignoring what they’re going through, Gupta said.
It’s also important to distinguish between empathy and compassion. When you empathize with someone’s suffering, you feel the same pain they do. When you practice compassion, however, you show concern for how the other person is feeling without shouldering their pain. It allows for some healthy emotional distance.
Resist the urge to ‘fix’ whatever problem your partner is dealing with.
Most people struggling emotionally don’t want someone to fix their pain, they want to feel understood. Bake that into your brain because it’s one of the most counterintuitive but universally true laws of human psychology I can think of. And once you really believe it and start acting accordingly, everybody starts feeling better.
Give yourself permission to be happy, even if your partner isn’t.
You are not responsible for their happiness. If you’ve tried to support your partner, the next thing you can do is things that keep you happy. Reading, exercising, hobbies and friends can sometimes be an example for your partner as well.
20 One-Sentence Writing Truths
To write from the heart, you need to write with courage, which means shedding skin and getting vulnerable.
To write well, you need to edit without mercy, “kill the darlings” of the writings of the heart, let go of all precious words that don’t serve a unique truth and logic.
Writing is following: your process, your attention, your curiosity lead the way, and you relax into it to find out where they go.
Writing is leading: your words, your rhythm, your choices chart a course for the reader, who is precious cargo, like a baby on board.
All that comes to pass in our lives, our joys and our misfortunes, the triumphs and the shames, are resources for the art, and they too are precious cargo.
Writing is hard, and it always will be, but practice makes even hard tasks familiar, even the task of unemptying a blank page.
Writing is a gift for one who wants to learn continuously; no act better forces deep learning than (the prospect of) sharing it with an audience.
Curiosity about how others (and the “other side”) live, think, and feel is the seed, the sun, and the water for any good writing, be it fiction or blogging.
Judging a rough piece or an idea harshly and early shortcuts the holy emergence that can body forth if you follow the thread dispassionately.
On an off day, the blank page can be a bad trip; when confronted with that, blow up time: think of your grandkids’ grandkids, or your grandma’s great-grandma, those whom you’ll never meet, who want to know you…. what would you share with them today?
Writing is two games — one of authenticity and vulnerability, and one of engineering impact and exploiting the reader’s receptivity — and learning how, when, and why to play each game is the craft.
Systemic forces are contriving to make moments of soul and deep thinking inconsequential; writing is resistance against those forces.
The saddest story and the harshest truth, when written with care and transcendent beauty, will raise the spirits of the reader.
Our minds crave binaries, the black and white, but writing makes rapturous the delicate gradations inherent in all things.
The blank page and the monkey mind will breed a sense of fear and shame about our own experience, thoughts, and insights (or lack thereof), but there is nothing to fear, there is no shame, full stop.
The universe loves boldness, and writing, in its boldness, demands that our fragile egos be on the ride, but ego, at times, can’t ride with that universal resonance without a buffer: the inner critic is that buffer.
Care is the cornerstone of good writing; if you care about your subject, your delivery, your reader, a magic and resonance will bloom from it.
A common misconception is that the longer, more erudite word contains more value and impact, but really, most truth, humor, and punch, in earnest, can be carved in four-letter words.
Don’t aim to write the Great American Novel; write one crisp, true paragraph, ship it, and repeat.
There’s literally nothing to it, nothing more you need to do to grow as a writer than to sit down now, today, and write — give that gift back to the world.
📖 What I've Been Reading
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Hendry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel
👋 See you next Thursday
Twitter: @PraveenAnuraj
Website: praveenanuraj.com