Posted January 8th, 2004 by Michelle

I finished a piece today that isn’t utter trash. Which worries me, because the stuff I don’t like is usually the stuff that gets kudos from others. It’s hard to know if waht I’ve written is any good; it’s mostly whether or not it scans. This piece scans, so I feel that I can let it go. It’s fascinating to me how my mind resists focus. It would rather multi-task than take a breather. I was working on this piece today, and my mind kept on a) turning my attention to the people in my coffee shop and, more importantly, b) kept reminding me that I have a novel to write. It was like the little icon that bounces at the bottom of my computer when it wants my attention.

There is a pose in yoga called Shivasana, or “corpse pose”, that many say is the most important. It concludes every practice, and allows your mind and your body to integrate what it has discovered, if anything. It’s really hard to stay focused during that pose. Well, I should say that it’s really hard to drift in the appropriate manner. You’ve just pushed your body to it’s outer limits, and rather than relaxing, my mind has a tendency to obsess. I have cried like a baby more often during Shivasana than I did as an infant. But what I learned to do was accept each bizzare thought that entered my mind, and then invite it to leave. I think about lying on a grassy Iowa field, but there is a white door nearby, and as these demons and ill-wishers, or even thougths of lunch, present themselves during Shivasana, I accept them, and then invite them to exit through the door. I have to do the same things sometimes when I’m working on more than one thing, or else I’ll spend my life looking through the boxes that I was supposed to organize and ultimately throw away.

I’m trying to figure out what I want. Do I want a full-time, 9 to 5 writing job? Do I want to be a staff writer? Do I want to be a journalist? Do I want to hole up and write my novel with no outside contact for a year? Do I really want to only be a freelance writer?

I don’t know.

I mean, duh, obviously this is the problem. But it remains. I just don’t know.