God – Page 3 – Deborah Makarios

December 2, 2016October 20, 2017

Lessons from (PseuDo)NaNo

50,000 words is a lot.
I can do it.
It isn’t easy.
7.8 is a really big earthquake (big enough to have its own Wikipedia page).
I can’t produce creative writing on three hours’ broken sleep.
Strangely, I can write scene outlines and blog posts in those conditions.
A supportive spouse is worth their weight in gold.
Rewards are good.
The right rules can help.
Sometimes you’ve just got to stop bashing your head against the wall and read.

50,000 words is a lot. I don’t know why exactly the NaNo people picked that exact number, but I went along with it. My final word count – well, that depends. (Lesson #11: I am better at writing than maths.) I made a note at the end of each session of how much I had written, and at the end of each day I added them up and then added them to my running total.

So far, so good. But here’s where it gets weird. Adding those daily totals together in a spreadsheet produced a different total to the running total in the planning document. Thinking myself terribly clever, I cunningly checked them against the actual number of words in the text, only to discover that that was a different total again.

So, the final word count is somewhere between 51,244 and 51,445, neither of which is shown in the chart below. (Chart made with LibreOffice and technical helpdeskry from the Caped Gooseberry.)

november

Not exactly the steady progress of the professional writer, is it? Allow me to decode.
First week: all went well. Knitting-in-order-to-think is a lifesaver. That spike on day four is largely due to the fact that I was editing a scene I pulled from the first draft, rather than writing a new scene altogether. It helps.

Second week: lower totals, but hanging in there. By this time, the Caped Gooseberry’s bronchitis was in full swing, and the completely missing day mid-week may not have been totally unrelated to a certain large country’s election results coming in.

Third week: Well. You see that tiny little snibbin of a blue dash, just above the 15? That’s Monday the 14th. 61 words. In my defence, I was shelled out of my bed just after midnight by a 7.8 earthquake and didn’t manage to doze off again until after dawn (for an hour or two). Despite the ongoing aftershocks, I decided I had to get some work done. 61 words was all I managed.

You might charitably suppose that the total emptiness of the following two days was due to ongoing aftershocks, but not really. Tuesday I spent in preparation for Wednesday, when I drove the Caped Gooseberry down the recently-reopened motorway to have his wisdom teeth out. (OK, I spent part of Tuesday in preparation. The rest was spent keeping an eye on earthquake updates.)

By Thursday of week 3 I was about 7,000 words behind, and starting to panic. I managed to write a reasonable amount in between changing the ice-packs on my dearly beloved’s distorted face and bringing him soft things to eat. Mercifully, on Friday I was able to use another section of the first draft (suitably rewritten) which did a great deal for the health of the word count.

From there it was just a matter of steadily trudging on, scene after scene, one bite at a time. What happened on Monday 28th I don’t know. It was a beautiful day, I felt good about the story, it was gathering momentum – and I just couldn’t get going. I scraped through 761 words in the morning, had other commitments in the afternoon, and spent the evening in that unpleasant condition where you know you should be doing something but you’re too tired and the more you fret about it the more tired you get. (And then you go to bed and lie awake for hours.)

Of course, I had a scheme of rewards planned out to boost the motivation: settling down with a book once I’d hit the word-count for the day (but not before); and three chocolate mint biscuits for each 10,000 word milestone. I also had three rules: make a pot of tea, commit the work to God, and think before writing. (I arranged for some plain knitting to facilitate this, resulting in approximately 4,737 stitches knit, though not all during thinking-time.)

Committing the work to God was a big one for me. I have been trying to make a habit of finishing what I start, and writing is an area where that wasn’t happening, despite my assurance that this is what God wants me to be doing. So for me, this was not just a test to see if I could do it, or a natty way of breaking the back of the second draft. It was an act of obedience. And as is so often the case with obedience, productivity results.

I am glad to find that I can be this productive, and I have every intention of carrying on with it. Not, perhaps, to the same extent (reaching 2,500 words per day involved a certain amount of robbing Peter to pay Paul) but something close. Maybe 1,800 words per day, or 2,000. The point is to be making steady progress (Exhibit A: Week 4, above).

I would like to leave you with these words from Randy Pausch’s book The Last Lecture: “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”

July 29, 2016

In Praise of Pollyanna

Yep, that Pollyanna. This isn’t a book review; I’m thinking of Pollyanna herself and her attitude, her “Glad Game.” She is practically synonymous with that positive view on life which is gratitude. We tend to think of gratitude as ‘saying thank you’ – but it runs a whole lot deeper than that. Gratitude isn’t just saying thank you for a gift, it’s a matter of what you recognize as a gift.

Pollyanna is a surprisingly unpopular child in this day and age; I have even heard “Pollyanna” used as a put-down or insult, when someone is deemed to be unacceptably positive or optimistic. And there, in a nutshell, you have the two fundamental ways of looking at life, the positive and the negative, the Pollyanna and the put-down.

One looks for the best in everything, and is thankful for it. The other sees the worst in everything, and is continually discontented and grumbling. I myself have been far too often guilty of the second, but I have hopes of reform. It will no doubt take practice, but hey, what’s neuroplasticity for, if not holding out the hope of lasting change?

Epicurus and Epictetus, the two Epic philosophers (the management apologizes for the irresistible pun) both had something to say on the subject of gratitude. The former advised people to “not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” The latter contented himself with noting that “he is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” Different words, same idea. Count your blessings.

Of course, counting other people’s blessings for them is seldom a good idea – unless you’re sharing their difficulties as well. Consider the astoundingly thankful Betsie ten Boom, who, according to her sister Corrie, was even thankful for the fleas which infested their barracks in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Why? Because of Paul’s urging to “Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.” Corrie admits to having been somewhat dubious, until she realized that their contraband Bible and totally forbidden Bible studies were escaping notice because none of the camp staff wanted to go in to inspect the place. God moves in mysterious (and sometimes itchy) ways…

So if Betsie could be grateful even for fleas in a concentration camp, surely we can find things to be grateful for in our own lives! Let us be honest with ourselves. Very few people will not be thankful if they are given an obvious gift, but the world still has an enormous number of basically negative people. I know – I’m a recovering negativeer myself. The problem isn’t that we are all basically pre-haunting Ebenezer Scrooges; the problem is that we don’t recognize most things as gifts. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

You may answer, because we don’t all believe in God. And perhaps you don’t, but it is still necessary for you to be grateful, even if you find yourself in the somewhat awkward position of being full of undirected thanks. Because people who are not grateful, who are never thankful for all the good things in their life but take them all for granted and focus only on the shortcomings and lacks – these people do not have good lives.

I don’t mean to suggest that if you expect bad, bad happens, and if you expect good, good happens. Your attitude isn’t in complete control of what happens to you, but it does control how you experience what happens to you. Life is a mix of good and bad for everyone. What matters is what you focus on and what you skate over. Beauty isn’t the only thing in the eye of the beholder.

Two years ago, 689,000 Facebook ~~guinea-pigs~~ users were subjected to an experiment: if what they saw on Facebook was filtered to skew more positive or more negative, would what they wrote move in the same direction? Answer: yes. There is quite a bit of controversy about this – not least the ethics of experimenting on people’s emotional balance without their permission, or, indeed, knowledge – but it raises an interesting point.

lemonagouti-534976_640 — Looking at flowers? No – looking at Facebook.

So be grateful. Not just for the obvious things, but for the unlikely ones, the ones that aren’t immediately recognizable; the ones that fade into the background of your life, the blessings that are too big to notice. Because there’s a reason why the word “ungrateful” is so often followed by the word “wretch”.

As with so many things in life, gratitude is easier if you get in the habit of it. The Caped Gooseberry and I finish each day tucked up in bed thanking God for the good things of the day. It’s something the Caped Gooseberry started in the earliest days of our marriage, and we’ve made it a habit. It works for us, and it makes sure that at least once each day, we focus on seeing the good. Even the worst day, when reviewed in memory, proves to have hidden pockets of blessings for which to be thankful.

And happily, there is no statute of limitations on gratitude! You can be thankful for the same thing(s) for years; you can be thankful for something you just remembered from years ago. There’s no correct technique to worry about, just have at it! But if you’ve forgotten how to be grateful, take a course of Pollyanna.

February 12, 2016

The One Thing ISIS Has Right

There’s a lot to dislike about ISIS. Their violence, their narrow-mindedness, their hate. There’s also a lot to pity. Really. For example, what are the chances that any of them will ever enjoy the delights of a loving marriage of equals? Low to none, I would say.

In fact, if you want to live a good life, ISIS is about the worst example you could choose to follow. They are wrong about so many things, starting with the idea that by using violence and ruthless subjugation to gain power for themselves, they are somehow pleasing God. As Anne Lamott observed, “you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do”.

But there is one thing which they have right. (Just one, last I checked.) And that is that religion matters. What you believe matters. You may not call it a religion; it may or may not have a supernatural element to it, but whatever (or whoever) matters to you the most is your religion, the driving force of your life, and that matters.

I have seen people lump all believers together, as though there was no meaningful difference between, say, Roman Catholicism and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Because the world would be a better place if Mother Teresa had limited the public expression of her faith to demanding the right to wear a colander on her head in her ID photo, amirite?

Let me just say this: if the beliefs you profess do not make any difference to how you live, you’re kidding yourself, and you’re probably not doing a very good job of kidding everyone else. People act in accordance with their beliefs (whether or not they are honest with themselves about what those beliefs are).

How we act affects ourselves and others. Therefore, it matters what people believe, and nowhere is this more evident than with ISIS. Because of their beliefs about God, and consequently about the nature of right and wrong, they do terrible things to their fellow humans. They are even willing to die in the commission of violence and murder, because they believe God will reward them with seventy virgins in paradise.

Side note: scholarly research has recently suggested that the 72 virgins said to be awaiting Muslim martyrs in paradise (only male martyrs, obviously; opinion is divided over what, if any, paradise there is for Muslim women) are a mistranslation; the original text should be translated as white raisins [warning: linked article is rather explicit in places].

Would the young men putting their lives on the line for ISIS be quite so enthusiastic if their promised reward was a bowlful of raisins – even really, really good raisins? I doubt it. What you believe makes a difference.

People act in accordance with their beliefs, even those beliefs they are not consciously aware of. That is why saying that people should keep their religion private just doesn’t work. In effect, that is saying that people should act in accordance with their religion only insofar as that is undetectable by those around them. (Otherwise they have to act in accordance with – what? Probably the overriding belief system of those around them, whether that be a religion of money, status, or something else entirely.) This seems to be the one area of life where it’s considered okay to do something just so long as you are completely half-assed about it.

Nor does it work to say that we should all just get along with each other and mind our own business. That’s a religion of tolerance, and, as previously mentioned, tolerance doesn’t work as a virtue, let alone a paramount virtue.

What people believe matters. ISIS know this, and that is why they are relentlessly driving out or destroying all those who hold different beliefs to theirs. Because whatever people believe will come through in their lives. You cannot hide what you are. I cannot hide what I am.