That. Is. All.

I am trying to avoid distraction today. It is not the big things that distract me. Tiny distractions cause enormous drains on my focus and energies.

Accomplishment, a wise man once told me, is simply a matter of doing things.

I learned this from a composer who described his decision to move to a shack in Vermont to write the great American opera.

He did what many composers do: “I wrote for a couple of hours one day, maybe an hour or two the next. For a couple of days I didn’t do anything.”

He had Spartan business cards printed up with only his name and the word “Composer” underneath. No phone number, no address. He handed them out while attending pretentious avant-garde concerts to which he could scam tickets.

I don’t know what prompted his breakthrough (or if his eureka moment came from a single incident) but he wisely realized that the bulk of his time spent “being a composer” included little time actually composing.

“Composers compose,” he discovered. “One day I realized that if I wasn’t composing 10 or 12 hours a day 6 and 7 days a week then it was just a waste of time.”

His statement impressed me with its dumb simplicity. It further suited my belief that few things in life are complicated.

What is the difference between writers and non writers? Writers write every day. Non-writers write as the mood strikes. To put it another way, writers write and non-writers do not.

The difference between photographers and non photographers? Simple. Photographers take pictures, non photographers do not take pictures.

Am I a composer? I was a few weeks ago, but not today. I might allow myself 24 hours of composerly afterglow in the event that I composed for several consecutive days.

If I continue to write all day today and every day this month I might call myself a writer in January.

At what level of pettiness need such distinctions be made? Perhaps among real writers it comes at dust-jacket time.

(I must stop using “perhaps.” It is an uppity sounding bit of hokum).

For most humans I think the distinction between what you are and what you are not is based on the existence of a paycheck for your efforts.

As much as that composer’s experience impressed me I came to question the idea of life’s all-encompassing commitments. I pondered with some dread the “Chosen Path” down which one travels for reasons eventually forgotten.

To be one thing in life, and one thing only, is that honorable? Is that righteous? Is there only room in life for one distinction?

I dated a woman who said, repeatedly, that all she wanted out of life was a career as a dancer.

She made her point with stuttered emphasis: “I want to be a dancer. That. Is. All.”

She talked about it as one would describe quitting smoking, or saving money to buy a house: A single definitive goal.

That relationship seems like a lifetime ago, but it is not. She was so skinny it was like going in on a birdcage. Our conversations had a similar caged-in quality.

Years later I hearkened back to birdcage girl when I, chagrined, discovered that thickly ribbed prophylactics produced a similar effect. That was with a woman I never connected well enough with to share such an observation.

I thought of writing a letter to the makers of that product, suggesting they call it “The Birdcage” and explaining why.

OK, now I am distracted.

I have been thinking lately about those chosen paths, and how the identities we assume in life are often determined by a small number of experiences within a narrow span of time.

I sometimes hear people describe moments in their lives when they knew this was It. This is what they wanted to do, what they wanted to be, where they wanted to go. These accounts are usually told with a sense of triumph, as if the greatest single mystery of life — what shall I do with my time here — had been solved.

These accounts can be genuinely stirring, but once in a while these stories are accompanied by echoes of ambivalence. Bullet points of events and milestones delivered in unintentional deadpan, it makes one think life is never more than a list.

Most people I know have an Everything. That Everything is usually sex or gender. Other people’s everything is politics, religion, or even sports.

I do not have an Everything.

Most of the time I do not even have an Anything.