Thoughtful Thursday – 3D and Writing
Coyote poses in front of my mobile craft dalek, three drawers and a surface for dreams.
It’s strange. As I look back on 2015, I wrote less fiction than I usually do, despite putting out several books and writing a short story for a podcast. I’ve also knit a lot less than I’m used to, though I’ve finished more than I think I have when I take time to talley.
The nature of 3-D creation, things like making soap, knitting, and sewing, to name a few, is that they all operate in the real world, the three-dimensional space in which we physically live. To an anorexic, this physical space thing is puzzling. By and large, we live in our minds, and coming down out of the mind into realspace can be scary and unfamiliar.
Oddly enough, my three-dimensional experimentation this last month and a half has been at the gym, rather than my crafts. In going to the gym everyday except holidays, I’ve learned a number of things. I already knew that “showing up on the page” is the way to accumulate words, it never occurred to me to apply it to the gym and getting fit. Now that I’ve made the connection, it seems obvious – I mean, if “showing up at the barre” works for dancers, or “showing up at easel” for painters, why wouldn’t it work for fitness? I’ve been working to apply the same regularity that I have with morning pages to my gym-going. It’s been working, if a lot less spectacularly than I thought it would have to be.
I suppose that’s the lesson, in many ways: reality is a lot less spectacular than the echo chambers of social media and drama would have us believe. The echo chamber wants us to be up in arms, heartbeats pounding, as we worry about the next crisis in some other place over which we have no control and no actual connection. We need to remember that we are physical bodies, not just mental, and that as such we have our own realities. The echo chamber is not reality. On a good day, it’s a reflection of reality; most of the time, it’s simply a tool of drama llamas.
So, while my thoughtful Thursday is less about crafts and writing, it’s still about three-dimensional space and writing. They relate to each other more profoundly than we realize.
\’There\’s never enough time to say and do all the things we\’d like. The question is how to say and do as much as we can with the time we\’ve got.\’ This is a quote, or an approximation of a quote from Albert Finney\’s \’Scrooge\’, a movie I watch every Christmas Eve with my mother. I\’m always running out of time, rushing to accomplish everything I\’d like. Every day, I only accomplish a fraction of what I\’d like, but at least, I\’ve done a fraction! 🙂 It\’s amazing, Catherine, that you\’ve managed to do as much as you have with the time you\’ve gotten. It\’s something to be proud of.
Thank you! Very kind of you to say. And I like the quote a lot! I think it\’s easy to focus on the lack, rather than on the abundance, and remembering that we are doing what we can is a healthy thing.
Some time ago I realized I was spending way too much time inside my own head, so when I was outside I made myself notice the things going on around me. The lady dressed so smartly on the escalator at the State of Illinois building, but with her hair in large curlers. How gracile the foot and toes of an Asian man wearing sandals looked compared to the Arab man\’s heavy, thick toed foot. The delivery man who looked so much like a pirate. But now I have the problem of spending way too much time on email and social media and too little time on real world tasks. I\’m going now to clean the bathroom.
I know what you mean; the echo chamber has a hypnotic pull. Piers Anthony called television a \”hypnogourd\” in his Xanth series; I think it applies to social media too. 🙂
Have fun doing some chores! I hope it grounds you!