A Place for Words

Unpeeling the Layers of Should

I should post again. Damnit, I started this blog almost two weeks ago, and there's still only one post! Who the hell do I think I am, starting a blog and not writing? I should write about this, I should write about that; something, anything from this pile of sticky notes accumulating on my desk. The "I should write about this" was especially big on this one particular idea that's been brewing in my brain—I even snapped the photos of the corresponding stickies. But...no writing. 

So let's take one of these other notes, the one pictured here, the one I just now gravitated toward, and talk about it.

SHOULD. One Buddhist teacher I know uses the phrase "shoulding all over yourself." I should start a blog, I should write more, I should exercise more, meditate more, eat better, be a kinder person, work harder, make more money, organize my photos, organize my closet, call my parents more often, get the car washed, mop the floors, smile more, think more positive thoughts—the layers of should range from everything in our external world to our deepest layers of our internal world. 

 

Life Choice Shoulds. We—particularly the perfectionistic we, the we driven toward self improvement or world improvement, the we who want a better life than our parents had—we spend a lot of time feeling bad about ourselves, feeling guilty for what we're not doing, beating ourselves up for not achieving some idea of What Life Should Look Like. We think we should have a certain kind of house, a certain kind of car, achive a certain level of income, attain a certain relationship status and bear a certain number of children. This weight becomes particularly oppressive on major birthdays, sending millions of people into minor depressions, on major shopping sprees, and on expensive birthday-related drinking binges. A great number of divorced people I know report "It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, even though I knew in the back of my mind it wasn't what I really wanted." We base many of our major life choices on some idea of What Life Is Supposed To Be—ideas from TV, ideas from books, ideas from our families. What if we tuned in to what we truly knew, instead of thought, and lived our lives from that place?

Daily Life Shoulds. How we live our lives on a daily basis can be driven by the ever-present Should—I put this in the category of time and life management. The cleaning, the eating, the exercising, the working, the reading, the paying of bills, the walking the dog, all that stuff we put off by plopping ourselves in front of the TV, eating cake, having a drink, or staring off into space. Most people I know I have some awareness of what they think they Should be doing with their time, which doesn't usually correlate to how they are actually spending their time. What if we truly believed that what we are doing at any given moment is exactly what we are supposed to be doing?

Little Projects of the Mind. When one gets to the level of exploring one's own consciousness, it's apparent that Should is everywhere in the mind. In meditation, I've often thought, "I Should be experiencing bliss right now, because I've experienced it before! I Shouldn't be fixated on what I should have said when that idiot said that crappy thing to me!" Any kind of personal path of development is littered with a path of Should: why can't I be like Deepak Chopra/Eckhart Tolle/Jack Kornfield/Bryon Katie, or hell, even Oprah or Tony Robbins. After all, they say it's possible. If I do what they say I will become rich/famous/exceedingly kind/blissed out/have so perfect of a life that I might as well leave the planet because there will be no problems that I have to solve so what's the freaking point?! What if we could drop judgement of ourselves for not having the experience our mind thinks we Should be having?

True Shoulds? After I wrote the above sticky note, I thought a lot about what in the moment of writing I termed "true shoulds: love, joy, and gratitude." It works as a orientation, but is much harder as a practice for us unenlightened beings. If you told me I Should be experiencing love when I am really pissed off at someone, I might want to punch you, or at least roll my eyes in exasperation. If you told me I Should feel gratitude when I am filing my taxes (which as a self-employed individual means paying lots of money) —well, I can eventually get there, after considering that I do not live in the Congo, and have paved roads, a public education system, and an elected president. If you told me I Should be joyful to be alive while waiting for my number to be called at the DMV or while on jury duty, well, I might, just might, be able to detach enough from my thoughts so I could observe the fascinating cross-section of people I'm so rarely presented with and wonder about their lives. I probably wouldn't be sitting there in a blissful meditation (and I have tried!). Perhaps the Shoulds of Truth have as many layers as the Shoulds of Delusion.

Should is all in the head. As far as I can tell, once you've dropped down into your heart, your gut, the core of your being, the only Should is Being Alive, and when you really look at it, there is no Should in wholeness. The paradox, of course, is that feeling like you Should live from your heart is an idea in your head.

And that I might not have written this post had I not let that other post bounce around in my head for more than a week before I sat myself down to write, and quickly realized I had to write about not what my mind had decided I Should write about, but whatever showed up. After all, I'm following my own rules here, and they're pretty lax. That other post will find a way to artciulate itself eventually.

 Goodbye Should, hello Blog Post With Funky Drawing! It was fun making you.

 

What To Say and How To Say It: A Manifesto

Hi there. Welcome. I'm so glad you could make it.

I haven't written a blog for a very long time, you see, and I'm a little nervous. But it's been itching at me for a good six months. I've been walking around writing essays in my head (perhaps even while standing on my head, in yoga), essays that you might enjoy reading, but I was, shall we say (in lieu of describing a complex emotional and psychological state), blocked.

In my pulling-the-blogging-trigger insecurity, I decided to check out the rules, refresh myself from this two-year hiatus, and find out what are people saying about blogging. Let's just say I didn't agree with much of it, and lo, I found the subject of Post #1, otherwise known as

LeeAnn's Blogging Manifesto.

Define your audience. Can you tell me who you are? Who you really are? The essence of you? What makes you laugh, what makes you cry, what makes you stand in front of the refrigerator and eat ice cream straight out of the container? Can I put you into an age bracket, an income bracket, an education bracket, an attitudinal bracket? Better yet, a psychographic bracket pulling in multidimensional cluster analysis with geoprofiling and discrete choice modeling? Someone's probably already done this, but I promise I won't. I can't even bring myself to put you into some nonsense profile like "for people who want transformational self exploration that enables higher learning." You're interested in things, and you like to laugh. You also eat, sleep, fart (even if you don't admit it), and you like hugs. Oh, and you can read. That's good enough for me.

Create a catchy name. The best names, according to one "How to Name Your Blog" post, combine the audience and benefit into one "targeted and attractive name." The name "A Place for Words" came to me while lying in bed a few months ago. Or maybe it was in a dream—all I know I was lying in bed and "A Place for Words" appeared in front of me, in orange letters. It was, and still is, as specific and targeted as I can get in writing for people who can read—people just like you. The great thing about it is that it doesn't imply that the words even have to make sense; I could have robots do the writing, or that monkey who's supposedly going to churn out Shakespeare one day.

Include an image in every post. Preferably a cheesy visual metaphor from clip art or the first page of Google image search. If you're going high class, buy pictures nice looking people pretending
to do things from a stock photo website. Seriously? If I see another stock photo visual metaphor, I'm going to puke. It would look something like this:

(Note: this is not a visual metaphor. It is a line drawing representing a person puking, or perhaps spouting nonsense, which I've tried hard most of my life not to do. Same with puking, now that I think about it.)

 

Since I do realize it gets boring looking at all that text, and it helps to have some color to break it up, I came up with a simple solution: sticky notes. For me, it's a snap: colored squares with pithy vebiage are stuck every where in my apartment- the computer, covers of books, my bathroom mirror, the kitchen cupboards. As an added bonus, they come in lots of colors and cost about 2 cents each plus the price of pen ink. Usually I write profund things on them, gleaned from podcasts or books, but I also write reminders, like "start blog" (as shown above), "cancel free trial by May 5," and "Actualize." I'm word person, not a picture person, and you just saw the extent of my artistic abilities. So I'll color up the blog with some sticky notes. If I do include photos, they will be ones that I take, or directly relateed to the post. If you really want to look at pictures, check the fancy Instagram feed on the sidebar, or go somewhere that specializes in visuals, like an art museum. This, after all, is A Place for Words.

Here's a sticky I wrote a while back, perhaps as a message to all scientists everywhere: 

 Write useful content. As in, provide constructive advice that your audience will benefit from. Headlines beginning with "How To" or "10 Easy Steps" will attract attention while allowing you to fit your knowledge of useful things into numerical buckets that people will read once and forget even faster than they forgot high school calculus. Since you're probably not interested in "7 Ways To Shave Your Dog's Ass" (even though it might increase my traffic from organic search) or "15 Ways to Be Completely Out of Touch with Your Surroundings Without a Device in Front of You" (because you already know at least 16), I scratched that idea. I have no intention of making anything I write here useful in any way, but if it does happen to be, feel free to write yourself a sticky note containing the salient points.

Write short sentences and paragraphs. This is the preferred Copyblogger style, and no self-respecting student of literature would ever adhere to it. In my first job, I was told to write in bullet points, a near sacrilege to a girl who devoured Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence novels as a teen and pored over history books in college. Bullet points and short sentences are fine for PowerPoint and third graders, but I have to say, I think in paragraphs and as far as I can tell, people who read The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker are doing just fine with complex sentences and long paragraphs like the ones I sometimes write (David Foster Wallace style), and just might write on this very blog in order to challenge your advanced reading comprehension capabilities even though I don't have an editor to really, really make sure it makes at least a little bit more sense than the monkey at the typewriter. 

Guest post on other blogs. This is widely touted among bloggers as a way of getting "link love." What it really means is to write for free so other people can sell ads or ebooks or teleseminars or t-shirts next to your content. I could also try writing on HuffPo so people like Ariana Huffington can buy more houses. Unless you're going to pay me, I'll keep writing right here. If I don't, I might have to follow one of the rules above, which would make my head explode in at least nine ways and a profusion of colored sticky notes. If you feel like contributing money though, and since I'm pretty sure you're one of those people who never clicks on ads, I'd love it if you dropped something in that handy-dandy module on the sidebar called "Tip Jar." It does after all, cost money to host this thing and buy sticky notes. Not to mention the band-aids for all the paper cuts.

Know your niche. If you've gotten this far in this more-than-1200-word post, you must be in my niche. I'm not going to write about knitting, stock cars, healthy snacking, brocade fabric patterns, or the travails of owning a blue car in a beige car world. What I will do though, is get these essays out of my head, and if I think they are worthy, onto this blog. I hope you'll come back to visit—and let me know if you like it.