TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE

WE MUST SLOW DOWN INSIDE

This week, I got the message, “Slow down.” It came in the form of a rune. Isa. Ice. One straight line carved into a smooth piece of wood. Another interpretation, at least this week, could be, “Chill out.”

It’s no surprise that I pulled that rune during a week filled with work-related stress, an existential crisis about the state of the world, and with day after day filled with the news of human suffering.

But really, “Chill out?”

How can we chill out or slow down when there is work to be done, and tasks to finish, and personal problems to figure out?

How can we chill out or slow down when there are genocides occurring, and autistic Black kids getting killed while holding gardening tools, and another trans teen bullied to death?

How can we chill out or slow down when the planet is in pain?

The answer is: We must.

Years ago, I studied the Gurdjieff Work. One lesson that Gurdjieff taught his students was to work quickly and quietly at a task like doing the dishes. Have you ever tried to quickly clean a sink filled with dishes while remaining quiet? It is difficult.  To accomplish doing something both quickly and quietly requires paying attention… and slowing down inside.

To slow down inside, I’ve realized over the years, is to be present in the moment while having a well-regulated central nervous system. When we speed up inside, we become agitated, clumsy, less precise, overwhelmed. Our central nervous system goes into overdrive, causing a cascade of physiological and psychological ramifications. Our heart rate spikes. Our breathing constricts. Our digestion rebels. We have trouble sleeping, or perhaps we want to do nothing but sleep. Our brains have trouble coping.

When we speed up inside—not from burst of joy or excitement, but from stress or anxiety—we become less effective in how we respond to the world. We react instead of choosing.

Right now? We need to slow down because we need to choose.

We need to ask: What is important? What is actually important? Not simply what is the biggest source of stress in the moment.

When we pause—to take some deep breaths, to re-center ourselves, to go for a walk, or sit in prayer or meditation, or rest beneath a weighted blanket—choice opens once again. We realize we have options. And if we are currently fortunate enough to not be living in an active battleground, I hope we honor those options.

By choosing to not live as if we are in an active battleground when we are not, we can offer help more effectively.

Is there a family who needs us? Can we feed someone? Can we write, or call, or join with friends in a targeted blockade? Can we listen to a teen who’s having trouble? Can we speak up? Can we listen more closely? Can we send money to someone who is offering direct help to those in need?

What is the next thing on our plate that needs to be addressed? Is that work problem really life or death? Likely not.

And what is one thing we can do to help the world? What is one thing we can do to alleviate suffering, right now?

It takes each of us doing that one thing, collectively. We hold each other, as James Baldwin once said, because the moment we stop, “the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.”

We hold each other, and we breathe. We invoke hope, and then take action to build a kinder world to come.

So today, I’m slowing down enough to choose.

How about you?

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 This piece was made possible by my wonderful Patreon supporters. I'm so grateful to each of them.

For Nex Benedict

In Love and Rage

The children were trained by adults. Trained toward hatred. Trained toward violence. Their fists struck, powered by the voices of their parents, their teachers, and the hatred spewing from their phones.

It was expected, wasn’t it? To gang up against the different one? The one who dressed like a budding dandy, who called themselves Nex, and whose friends knew them as he or they, him or them. Especially when Nex had the temerity to defend himself.

No ambulance was called by the school.

Nex died for no reason other than: some adults cannot allow anyone who looks, or acts, or feels differently than they do to live.

The state school superintendent of Oklahoma—Ryan Walter’s—pushes anti-LGBTQ+ policies. He appointed Chaya Raichik—who does not live in Oklahoma—to an advisory council that oversees the state school libraries. Children are not allowed to change their gender on school records. Owasso High School insists that students use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth.

This scenario is not just happening in Oklahoma. It is happening all over the country. Families are fleeing places from the Southern states through the Northeast… fearing for their children’s lives. But with 463 proposed anti-LGBTQ+ throughout the country, there are scant places left to go.

If you are an adult, and not doing your best right now to help the children in your lives? The different ones. The strange ones. The ones who don’t quite fit the status quo?

You are remiss in your duties.

If you are a parent who cannot find a way to love your own child? I have no words for you. You are not worth my breath.

I’ve written and written and written, about queer joy and queer rage. I’ve written about racial and economic justice. About disability and courage. Those words I wield so cleverly sometimes?

They did not save Nex. To the teens who wielded their parent’s words, pummeling him to the floor? Nex was just another strange, indigenous teen who dared to be himself. Nex became—to them—a thing to be bullied, not a person to be cherished. A person to be saved.

The United States is a dangerous place for trans people right now. It is a frightening place for queer people right now. It always has been, but yes, in this moment, it is also worse. I’ve lived through the decades of gay bashing and the AIDS epidemic, of Matthew Shepherd and too many Black trans women killed to count.

And right now? Some very warped and angry, smug and powerful people are poised against us. Sowing hatred. Promulgating fear. Scaremongering. Engaging in acts of stochastic terrorism that leave too many dead.

Think the Libs of TikTok aren’t coming for you, too? They are. The laws to control bodily autonomy are everywhere. Women are still dying. Birth centers closing. Bathrooms policed. Too many are locked in prisons for no crime other than being poor.

The billionaires don’t care about us.

The politicians don’t care about us.

The shareholders don’t care about us.

They don’t care about the multiple genocides happening, other than finding the ways they can profit. And they cannot profit from queer or trans children. Not enough.

They manipulate us into thinking that someone else is the real problem, the real danger, the real threat. Someone like Nex, who tried to defend himself, and whose soft body fell to the bathroom floor. Someone like a parent at the southern border, worried that their kids won’t make it through the night.

All we have is each other. What are you doing about it? How will you choose to help?

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 This essay was made possible by my amazing Patreon supporters. I can't thank them enough.

Creativity Has a Plan

As the Gregorian year of 2023 drew to a close, I used this arbitrary marker to take stock, to glance at my process of the year, and to key into what I hope my process to be for the next year. Here are a few thoughts on my general process, written at the end of December, 2023:

On a call with one of my handful of coaching clients, I talked about the importance of making a plan, if only to have something to deviate from.

Plans are the backbone of my creative and business life, but not the heart. The heart is my wish to connect. Structure helps me connect to others with more clarity and reach.

As I look back on the past calendar year, I can see all the things I accomplished, what I learned and integrated into my process, and what I finally got around to starting that is on the schedule now for next year.

I’m a creative who works for myself. That means I must have structure—however arbitrary—because there is not one imposed from outside. The only outside structure imposed on my life are bills that need paying, and some people who rely on me. Luckily, I have intrinsic internal motivation, which I know not everyone has.

But internal motivation itself is not enough. There are plenty of ambitious people out there who don’t end up accomplishing much. So, every year I set a writing, teaching, and production schedule. Every year, I set myself business tasks to learn, experiment with, and then implement. Threaded through these schedules are commitments to my health, spiritual practice, and my family, community, and friends.

Around once a quarter I reassess my plans and adjust them accordingly. I always go off schedule, whether because of the vagaries of my autoimmune disorder or brain injury, or simply because my ambitions slightly outstrip my capacity.

But I understand there will be deviation, going in. I build in buffers and time cushions and set my goals pretty low compared to some of my colleagues.

People are often amazed by the amount I get done, when I feel as if sometimes, I barely work at all. My schedule is the reason why.

How many books do I want to write in a year? How many Kickstarters do I want to run? What sort of teaching—if any—do I want to do? What do I want to study? What business practices do I wish to implement?

Part of my planning process is to include plenty of time for research and study, usually over breakfast or during my daily walks or weekly gym time. There are projects that, three years ago I thought, “I really should learn how to implement that.” But there were systems I needed to shore up or put in place, and research to do before I got around to it. Those “I really should” plans didn’t make it onto the schedule, except as something to study when I had time.

Late this year, I finally got around to starting one of those larger projects, and plan to get it up and fully running in the next calendar year.

Another project is one I’ve danced around for a decade, but needed to stabilize my health again, and get core creative and business practices firmly established first. It’s a podcast on magic and creativity that I plan to launch project next month, on a trial basis. Yeah. I’m easing in and want to see how it goes. Flexibility, right?

My process is filled with determination, consistent showing up, and a whole lot of wiggle room. That is how I get things done. I’m rarely frozen by indecision because I have a raft of projects to work on. If my brain can’t manage project one today? Off to project three, it is!

Over the past few decades, I’ve seen creative after creative flourish: knitting, writing poetry, making music, doing crafts, building, writing novels, dancing… Some of these creatives are full time, but many of them create part time. I’ve also seen creative after creative stall out, undermined by life, indecision, or self-doubt.

The difference is not only prioritizing creativity—which is key—another important facet of consistent creativity is allowing ourselves to remain flexible and curious. And to breathe through any perfectionist tendencies. A lot of creatives become frozen because of a need to tell the right story, or to make the perfect song.

They forget that they’re the ones in charge. Stalled or burned-out creatives allow creative expression to become a chore, instead of a source of curiosity, discovery, and joy.

And that is another thing my production and writing schedules do for me: they remind me that I’m responsible for my creativity and my business. They remind me that I’m fortunate enough to earn my bread doing things that I (mostly) enjoy. Scheduling also reminds me that the things I deem as important need me to show up and actively illustrate that I care.

If our subconscious decides we’re not all that interested in whatever it is we say we want, then it won’t happen. We retrain our subconscious through action, not through saying something is so.

So that’s my process in a nutshell: I decide what is important and I place an arbitrary structure around it to help me show up for all those important things.

How about you?

How did your past year go? How do you hope the current year will go? Do you wing it? Do you make resolutions? Do you have a plan?

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This essay was made possible by the ongoing support of my amazing Patreon people!