Realization

So here I am, behind schedule, tired to the point of fighting sleep as I type this (hoping for a third wind to be honest) and wanting to keep up with a commitment I made to myself to write this blog. I was supposed to write about realization last week. This week it dawned on me that there were several reasons why I hadn't been keeping up with this writing:

1) I was taking it a little too seriously. I was writing a draft in my notebook, typing it up, and then, well at first anyway, having someone read over it. Now. That's not to say that I shouldn't take it seriously. After all, I'm posting it on the internet to be there for, I guess, forever, and it's writing, and I take my writing seriously, but, I think I should trust myself to blog, instead of draft. To not put so much of a burden on editing myself.

2) I wasn't having fun. This follows naturally from taking it a little too seriously. I was trying to come up with different formats, unique angles to approach the words I wanted to discuss, when I think I should write what comes up, in the time I give myself to sit down to write. This way I can look forward to the time I get to sit and think on the page, and not think about the process of drafting,  about what I have to do next.

3) I have too much to do. I won't go into it here, but it is true. Writing is something that I want to do. And I am determined to make time for it while I have too much to do. Still, it is a reason for why I have gotten behind. When it comes down to it, the obligations I make to other people are more important than I feel that this blog is, and even more than I am determined to make time to write, I am determined to make good on my commitment to those I love.

I'm typing this on the couch. I'm in my underwear. I'm listening to Accents Radio show. I'm about to get up and brush my teeth. Kiss my daughter goodnight. Kiss my fiancée goodnight. It took me 37 minutes to write this post. And I enjoy it. There's no poem here. No prompt. There probably won't be for some time. There might even be mistakes. I'm not going to proofread. I am OK with that. I'm having fun. I'm looking forward to this, again.

Next week I'll be talking about gratitude. 

Mistakes

Learning from your mistakes it the lazy and dangerous way to handle mistakes. The common phrase “learn from your mistakes” you hear is inviting though. It gives us permission, of sorts, to mess up—as long as the lesson you take away from the mistake is valuable. I don’t mean to say that you can’t learn from mistakes, you can and should. Most mistakes anyway. Some do lead to death and dismemberment, so I want to suggest alternate way to deal with mistakes, that is to anticipate what would or could go wrong in a given situation and work to avoid it. To do this I’m going to use an analogy to playing the trading card game Magic the gathering.

What you need to know about the game to understand this is that (1) you have to make decisions and those decisions can either help  you win by defeating your enemy (who must die!) or lead to your downfall (death). You also need to know (2) that your decisions are based on known information (your cards—I said it was a trading card game ) and your opponents cards—unknown information. The parallel to real life is apparent, I hope. In a given match, usually lasting between 25 minutes to 4 hours, you will make many decisions that will impact your chances of winning, as is the case with any game of skill (luck is involved, sure, but life has it’s luck, as well).

It is crucial in the game (and life) to figure out what decisions will be the best decisions and what will be the mistakes. The best players anticipate what a mistake will be before they make it and seek to understand why it would be a mistake, and what would be an acceptable alternative. This is how victories are won consistently in a game where variables are changing constantly, much like life.

 A lot can be learned from making mistakes, but that is not an excuse to make them. I’m not sure my poetry has benefited from this thinking, but my life has and those two are linked in the most intimate way.

Rivalry

What interests me about rivalry is the community that must exist to support it. Community exists on many levels. In family a rivalry can exists between two siblings, between parents, between cousins. Small towns and big cities have sports team rivalries. I suppose these are the two common kinds of rivalry, though technically a rivalry is simply a competition for the same objective or for superiority in a field (according to google define, anyway).

What makes a rivalry noteworthy is the spectator. To properly fuel a rivalry the spectator has to be a member of the community that is shared by the competitors. The competitors have to care about the spectator, perhaps this is way family rivalries are so vehement. The spectator should feel as if the well-being of the community rests on the outcome of the rivalry being in their favor. This is more common in sports rivalry, because in family rivalry there will not be a “spectator” in the way I mean it. Though family a rivalry can spread to immediate family, extended family, to the local community and beyond.

This is probably a modern interpretation of rivalry, highlighting the competition, the performance aspect of obtaining a goal or proving dominance.

 

In poetry, the one clear area of competition is the slam. I tried this for about a year. It was my entrance into poetry. I competed in a regional slam and was placed on the national team as an alternate. Basically, I went to watch, to be a spectator. The nature of slam creates rivalry. There is community amongst teammates, spectators within those community, and judges who evaluate superiority.

I moved away from that. Still I think that as we seek to publish and reach people with our poetry, competition is inevitable. There are, after all, contests for individual poems, chapbooks, full-length books.

What I like about the non-slam, local community I live in is our attempt to overcome rivalry. We are all seeking the same goal, in the same field, trying to be our best, but we aren’t seeking superiority over each other. In fact, the opposite may be the case, we are trying to advance each other to understand and cope with our own inferiority.