\t\t\t\tI 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.<\/p>\n
\nAccomplishment, a wise man once told me, is simply a matter of doing things.<\/p>\n
\nI learned this from a composer who described his decision to move to a shack in Vermont to write the great American opera.<\/p>\n
\nHe 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.”<\/p>\n
\nHe 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.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
\n“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.”<\/p>\n
\nHis statement impressed me with its dumb simplicity. It further suited my belief that few things in life are complicated.<\/p>\n
\nWhat 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.<\/p>\n
\nThe difference between photographers and non photographers? Simple. Photographers take pictures, non photographers do not take pictures.<\/p>\n
\nAm 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.<\/p>\n
\nIf I continue to write all day today and every day this month I might call myself a writer in January.<\/p>\n
\nAt what level of pettiness need such distinctions be made? Perhaps among real writers it comes at dust-jacket time.<\/p>\n
\n(I must stop using “perhaps.” It is an uppity sounding bit of hokum).<\/p>\n
\nFor 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.<\/p>\n
\nAs 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.<\/p>\n
\nTo be one thing in life, and one thing only, is that honorable? Is that righteous? Is there only room in life for one distinction?<\/p>\n
\nI dated a woman who said, repeatedly, that all she wanted out of life was a career as a dancer.<\/p>\n
\nShe made her point with stuttered emphasis: “I want to be a dancer. That. Is. All.”<\/p>\n
\nShe talked about it as one would describe quitting smoking, or saving money to buy a house: A single definitive goal.<\/p>\n
\nThat 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.<\/p>\n
\nYears 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.<\/p>\n
\nI thought of writing a letter to the makers of that product, suggesting they call it “The Birdcage” and explaining why.<\/p>\n
\nOK, now I am distracted.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.<\/p>\n
\nI sometimes hear people describe moments in their lives when they knew this<\/u> was It<\/i><\/b>. 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.<\/p>\n
\nThese 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.<\/p>\n
\nMost people I know have an Everything. That Everything is usually sex or gender. Other people’s everything is politics, religion, or even sports.<\/p>\n
\nI do not have an Everything.<\/p>\n
\nMost of the time I do not even have an Anything.<\/p>\n
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