PERSISTENCE

IT'S ABOUT THE JOURNEY

Okay, the holidays are over. That means that my office is no longer under the dominion of guest lodging and I'm back at the keyboard. Does this mean I haven't been working at all? No, though between the 23rd of December and the 1st of January I was out of my cozy den. Like a wolverine poked out of his lair. So long as you didn't make eye contact I was unlikely to go defense and start slobbering and growling.

In anticipation of being persona non grata in my normal territory, I printed out several chapters of the novel I'm working on so I could at least carry on with the revisions they needed. (Thank technology for the invention of the i-pad. Though I'm still a throwback comfortable with yellow pads and ballpoint pens.) I also wrote a few new pieces of poetry and debuted one in a weekly venue in the next town over. In between I spent some time selecting a couple of paintings for a show at one of the more prestigious public galleries in the area. The image above is one of the two entitled, "Frequency of Persistence". It's an original acrylic on canvas and something of an homage to the Japanese wood block print masters.

What does that have to do with revising a novel or writing poetry? A long time ago, a good friend and early mentor told me, "If you do something long enough, some notable will be fool enough to call you a master based strictly on longevity." In other words, if you PERSIST, you can succeed. Conversely, if you sit around on your ass waiting for inspiration and acclaim all you're likely to do is wear out the seat of your pants. The train you're waiting for probably already left the station, so your best bet is to shoulder your pack and get walking.

I could have waited for the holidays to pass while taking a vacation from my work - But why? We've all had the experience of setting something aside for a while only to return and find that those half-a-dozen ideas we were thinking of incorporating have either fled or staled. I don't tolerate that kind of sloth in myself. Which is one of the reasons I've enjoyed the success I have. Not because I'm brilliant or gifted. I just won't allow myself to stop.

Last night I was relaxing and watching a movie. Well, I thought I was relaxing. In the beginning of the film something tripped the synapses and made a connection to something I'd seen and heard the night before. This all chained into a thought that would make a great subplot in the next long work of fiction I've begun outlining. (Yes, outlining one while revising the other). This all bubbled to the surface through many years study in Zen Buddhism.

Confusing enough yet? In Zen we are taught that the path most people envision is the straightest route to the top of the mountain. (When you get there take a good look around. The wise old holy man you were expecting? Uh-uh.) Life has a habit of throwing insurmountable obstacles up right where we least expect them. The route we take is really determined by the forks we find in our road. We may even find that we never reach the summit. Who cares? If you're paying close attention to the trip, you'll find everything you ever sought. That's why we say in Buddhism that there are 84,000 gates (or doors) on the path to enlightenment. If the path you're trudging doesn't work, change course. Open a new gate and walk through.  Realize though that everything is interconnected to a degree as unfathomable as the neurological paths of the human brain.

The glory of the brain and the creativity it harbors is that they are both boundless. However, if you don't stoke the furnace, if you don't run the machine on a regular basis, like any other device, it will rust and freeze up. Is every destination on the journey worthwhile? No. In fact, a lot of them are dead ends. But that doesn't mean that all you encounter on that particular branch is worthless. Like any pioneer on foreign soil, it's up to you to select things of possible meaning or utility and pack them away for when they're needed. This requires sorting and classifying and, sometimes, discarding or squirreling away some of your horde when it has no immediate obvious use. Notebooks, photos, audio recordings, video, your library and the libraries and museums of the world are the cache's of human fruition and knowledge.

But for any of it to work you have to PERSIST. Otherwise no one will ever know you were here or call you a master. Deserved or not.