26Jun

Only Have Time for Essentials

• Saved in: Craft, Fiction Writing, Memoir, Pencils, Pens, Personal Essay, Process, Publishing & the Marketplace, social media, social media, Technology & the Internet, Typewriters, Vermont, Writers, Writing Experiences, Writing Life, Writing Tools
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on Only Have Time for Essentials

“At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essen­tials.”
— Vir­ginia Woolf, diary, 3/22/1928

I stum­bled upon this quo­ta­tion ear­li­er this week. What struck me most about it was that it expressed a thought I had back in Feb­ru­ary, when I turned 46 myself, although my ver­sion of the thought at the time was admit­ted­ly less elo­quent.

I said to myself, “Chris, you’re 46 now. You don’t have time for bull­shit any­more. You don’t have time for ephemera. You can only spend time with peo­ple you tru­ly enjoy, and you have to cut out of your life all peo­ple and activ­i­ties that either don’t make you feel good or that sap your time and ener­gy. Your writ­ing is para­mount.”

 

 

Over the years I had already win­nowed my friends to a select few whose com­pa­ny I loved. Sev­en or eight years ago, I stopped watch­ing cable TV, with its relent­less com­mer­cials and anx­i­ety-induc­ing 24-hour news. I stopped doing all famil­ial “oblig­a­tions,” which I had found stress­ful reminders of the pass­ing of time—time I should be writ­ing. I let myself drift away from past acquain­tances who had become bur­dens to me. And, this year, I stopped par­tic­i­pat­ing in social media. In fact, I only go online now every oth­er day, to do book-relat­ed research or answer emails.

Get­ting off social media has been a ter­rif­ic boon for my writ­ing. No longer post­ing pho­tos or writ­ing about some­thing that hap­pened to me, moments after it hap­pened, has made me reserve my need for self-expres­sion for my books. I’m no longer dis­si­pat­ing my ener­gies by spend­ing hours online try­ing to pro­mote my books and my “brand.” I’m no longer feel­ing the per­pet­u­al sense of dis­con­tent about my life and the state of my writ­ing career that I felt when I had to wade through every oth­er so-called writer’s “look at me, look at me” crap.

My friend Jason Scott has likened my new approach to a samu­rai sword-mak­er: I’ve shut myself off from most of mod­ern soci­ety to live in the moun­tains forg­ing, ham­mer­ing and tem­per­ing steel into swords, day in and day out. This is an accu­rate anal­o­gy.

 

 

This week I returned from a 3‑week writ­ing sojourn in the Green Moun­tains of Ver­mont. I’d always want­ed to shut myself off from every­one and every­thing for a while and see what came from the expe­ri­ence. The house—my friend’s vaca­tion house, high in the mountains—didn’t have inter­net access or even a tele­phone. (To make any calls, I had to dri­ve down the moun­tain to a town where I could get a cell sig­nal.) There was satel­lite TV, but the only show I watched was Lit­tle House on the Prairie, in the after­noons a few days a week. I ate health­ily, exer­cised dai­ly using my TRX, and med­i­tat­ed. I did some film­ing of the expe­ri­ence with an HD cam­era Jason gave me. Most impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, I wrote, on my Roy­al man­u­al type­writer or in long­hand (mak­ing pho­to­copy “back­ups” of my work at the local library), and spent the long moments between sen­tences star­ing out at nature: trees wav­ing in the wind, rain pour­ing down, rain­bows form­ing, turkeys for­ag­ing on the edge of the woods, and, once, a black bear strolling across the lawn at dusk.

Study­ing nature this intense­ly and read­ing and med­i­tat­ing on a short book on aiki­do, The Art of Peace, remind­ed me of a cou­ple of prin­ci­ples regard­ing cre­ativ­i­ty. These are ideas that I learned either in my read­ing of Walden and oth­er phi­los­o­phy years ago, or when I was a Boy Scout and spent whole days in the woods, but which prin­ci­ples I had for­got­ten:

Nature is in a con­stant state of cre­ation, but it nev­er stops to con­tem­plate how its lat­est cre­ation (the new blade of grass, the spi­der web, the rain­bow) will be received. Nature just cre­ates and moves on. Nature nev­er ceas­es. Nature focus­es on only the tru­ly essential—the cre­ation and per­pet­u­a­tion of life. Nature doesn’t waste time.

 

 

The book I’m writ­ing now is a mem­oir about my life when I was 16. Of my three weeks in seclu­sion in Ver­mont, I spent most of that time recall­ing events from 30 years ago.

Believe it or not, it was very stress­ful work. Why? Because I was forc­ing myself to relive uncom­fort­able emo­tions relat­ed to sit­u­a­tions with peo­ple I had either loved or hat­ed. There were a few days when I recalled events so painful, it turns out I had blocked them out for 30 years. On one of these evenings, the feel­ings I was reliv­ing were so painful, I broke down and had three beers—this, after a year of sobri­ety unfor­tu­nate­ly.

On bal­ance, how­ev­er, the Ver­mont sojourn was a great expe­ri­ence for me, and the most impor­tant thing I learned is this: I don’t want a lot of what mod­ern soci­ety has to offer, and usu­al­ly I don’t need it either. I tru­ly came to under­stand what Hen­ry David Thore­au meant when he advised peo­ple to “sim­pli­fy, sim­pli­fy, sim­pli­fy.”

I’m 46 now. I only have time for essen­tials.

Tagged: Art of Peace, Chris Orcutt, craft, Green Mountains, memoir, nature, Orcutt, sojourn, Thoreau, Vermont, writing, writing retreat

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