Mombie – a bit of everything

Story-A-Day May – Getting Home

I’m doing the Story-A-Day challenge. This is a quick story I wrote this morning, I gave myself 15m to write it and 2m to edit. The writing prompt was ‘Getting Home’     

 

Janna leaned her head back against the bus seat. It should have been more comfortable than it was, but even one of those plush bus seats offers no comfort when it is worn thin over the metal frame. She left her head there anyway, the base of her skull bouncing on the fabric covered metal. It generated a kind of muscle-y headache but it distracted her from thoughts of facing her aunt.

    She knew what Aunt Sadey would look like, wearing jeans and a grey sweatshirt – the crew neck, plastic-y kind that no one else wears anymore – leaning her left shoulder on the door frame, an unlit cigarette hanging from the fingers of her right hand, hair dragged back in a ponytail except for a scrappy little bang that would be standing up in sections from being swept off of Sadey’s forehead. And she’d be shaking her head, just a little, so Janna would know that she’d let her family down again.

“You were your mother’s pride and joy, you know. You were going to save the lot of us.” Sadey wouldn’t even have to say the words aloud, Janna knew the script. “I knows how hard it is. Sure, haven’t I had the same troubles myself?”

It was the same thing that Sadey said every time, but Janna didn’t believe it. She couldn’t imagine that grey Aunt Sadey had ever gone off excited for anything, let alone for a job. Sadey always seemed happy enough working at Mercer’s Convenience, keeping the local kids from stealing chips and beer, standing on the front steps for a smoke on her break. Janna wasn’t like Sadey though, she was excited. Every single time.

The problem was that Janna she always started with such confidence. She was always sure that this was the one that was going to pan out, this was the job that would switch them up over that line from almost having enough to finally being able to get ahead.

It never was though.

Lots of times it was close, but when it all came down to it, Janna just didn’t fit. Her clothes were a little too cheap, her make-up a bit too heavy, her language a bit too ragged. After the interview it was always completely clear, a glance in the mirror told her what she had done wrong this time. She’d love to have that insight beforehand just once, when it would be of some use.

She was just tired. She needed a break somewhere. But if that break wasn’t coming, then she needed Sadey to not be waiting at the door when she got home from trying. It was never not getting the job. It was never the pursed lips of the interviewer. Never the sad head shake from the secretary on the way out. The gut-wrenching part was Sadey, standing on the steps, knowing that Janna had let them all down again. The saddest part was never not getting the job, the saddest part was getting back home.

Yoga Again and Still

Yesterday marked 40 days of yoga for me. 20 minutes every day of downward dog, cat/cow, pigeon etc – it’s a wonder I didn’t have an allergy attack – including at least 5 minutes of savasana*/meditation. Most days were good, I looked forward to the practice, to getting on the mat and dropping into the yoga headspace. Some days, though, it was agony. I didn’t want to turn off the worries or frustrations or even to just stop what I was doing. I did not want to tune in to where I was, I wanted to stay kind of skimming along.

If I was doing just a personal challenge, I might have opened an e-book and done the poses while reading, but that’s not the yoga that Kara-Leah describes and it is not the yoga I signed up for. If I had read at the same time, I would have been just stretching, and that is not the same. It’s not even close.

Yoga requires a mental finger on the switch that lets your mind hop from thing to thing, the switch that puts your brain hamster on its wheel. You have to keep that switch held down because otherwise it flips up on its own and you find yourself jumping from idea to idea and worry to worry inside your head. When you have your finger on the switch, you notice when it has flicked up and you can flick it down again. It’s a practice, of course, so you’ll have to flip the switch down over and over until it starts holding down for longer times, but if you are just doing regular stretching instead of yoga, then it’s hard to notice that it is up at all.

For me, regular stretching and yoga feel different. I am impatient when I stretch – I just want to get it over with. Yoga gives me ease – I may wish I was done with the whole practice, but in each pose I don’t feel like I am checking it off a list. Instead, I am seeing what this pose offers me and deciding how long to hold it based on that, instead of based on boredom. It’s almost like yoga is something my brain does WITH my body, but stretching is something that my brain tells my body to do.

So, every day, for 20 minutes, my brain and my body got on the mat together, no matter how late it was, and I moved through the poses, and lay still through savasana – often counting my breaths in the effort to stay focused on my practice. And it was good. It was lovely. And it felt like a kindness to myself.

I wasn’t perfect, a couple of times I really had to force myself to get started and a few times I had to take a break in the middle to respond to the rest of my life buzzing around me. But it was an excellent way to spend the last 40 days. And I’ll be doing it again. Starting today.

*I’m not just being snooty, savasana sounds much better than ‘corpse pose’ hey?

 

Test Today!

         My black belt test is at 4PM today.

 

I am incredibly excited and incredibly nervous.

 

 

I keep telling myself that I don’t need to be nervous. I know my patterns, I know my step-sparring and my self-defense. I am prepared to spar, and I definitely know my theory.* I passed my pre-test, and several black belt friends have told me that I am doing well. There is no reason for me to worry. Yet, I am completely aflutter here today, and most of yesterday. Not panicky, I think even my brain has to admit that I know my stuff, but I’m still working through fear of the things I don’t realize that I don’t know.

 

The real key to getting into and even enjoying my test today is to bring my full focus to the task at hand. I know that and I am working on it. I have done these patterns a hundred plus times each, and I have been going to extra classes to really set them in my brain. I have been practicing in the test space**, both in order to get some extra practice time in AND so it becomes a more neutral space in my mind. I have been practicing relaxation techniques, and doing yoga to ensure that my brain can relax and I can be fully in my body instead of just being a jumble of flickering thoughts and what-ifs.

 

This is the hardest work – convincing my brain to just be where I am, not worrying about the next step, not wondering if I am doing okay, just being. The thing is though, I seem to have a very narrow sweet spot between overthinking and just checking out when I am doing my patterns and the like. It takes a lot of energy to stay in that place where I am focused on the now, without going right to a place where I am not thinking at all.

 

When I think too much, I hesitate and I lose my rhythm. When I check out, I make many micro-mistakes, slightly wrong stances, I put my hands too low, I don’t turn far enough. When I am in that sliver of a sweet spot, I trust that my body knows what it is doing, and that the next moves are there waiting for me. It’s great when it happens, but I have not yet figured out how to get there on command. I wish someone could wave a magic wand and grant that to me.

 

I know when I arrive at the test today, I will be told not to overthink, to just relax. And I will do my best. I will breathe deeply and I will try to keep my focus on the movement at hand – and at foot 😉

 

And in the mean time, I will repeat Dame Julian of Norwich’s wise words – ‘All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.’

 

 

*Theory is my strong point. Memorizing, comparing information and dealing with facts from my brain instead of depending on my body to do what it is asked to do? I’m all over that.

 

**Our school has two practice spaces – one is my regular class space and the other one I usually only go to for testing – even though students in that area attend classes there all the time.

 

Getting words on the page

I’ve written almost 20,000 words since the 24th of February. That’s fiction practice (writing exercises), part of short story, plus a number of blog entries. And all of it is self-motivated writing, not for clients, not for a contest, not for NaNoWriMo, just all for me, writing for the sake of writing.

This has never happened before. I’ve done lots of writing for one reason or another, but this kind of consistent, large scale writing-for-its-own-sake, has eluded me until now. At this point, the writing has just become a thing I do before I get to my other work for the day, and it’s all because of a couple of insights from the time management course I’m taking (Cairene MacDonald’s Foundations ).

The first was Cairene’s reminder that preparing for work was part of the work. It’s not an evil to get out of the way, it’s key, it’s foundational, it’s necessary. So any preparation I do ‘counts’ towards my work of the day. That freed me up to do my fiction practice, since I need practice to get better, and every word I write in practice will make my later ‘work’ words that much better. Practice will make the later work easier.

The second was my own realization, through Cairene’s exercises, that whenever I have been trying to work, and ended up stalling and procrastinating, I was actually dealing with the feeling that I *should* be doing something else. So, among other things, I wasn’t doing the writing I wanted to do because I *should* be doing other work. Yet, I wasn’t getting that done because of another layer of should. After some examination of the underlying shoulds, I realized that I need to do certain types of work at certain times of the day (routine tasks belong in the afternoon, for example), and that I need to start my day with my most satisfying tasks.

After that, my writing moved waaaay up my to do list and it has made a huge difference in my days. I have a few tiny routine tasks that I clear off my list immediately each morning, and then I dive into my writing for 30-45m. I don’t miss that time in my ‘real’ work at all. In fact, taking that time for my writing has seemed to create space for more tasks in the rest of my day.

I’ve spent a long time trying to fit my writing in and to find ways to make it somewhat automatic. If you have been reading this sporadic blog for any length of time, you know how often I have tried to establish a solid writing practice. This time, it makes more sense than ever and it has been easy, not a challenge, to fit the writing in. I have created my own motivations for getting words on the page, and it feels fantastic.

Of course, we’ll see how I feel about the whole thing when I get to editing that story I’m writing. 🙂