I is for Idle

It's the A to Zed Challenge! I'll be posting the first half of the month from Ottawa where I'm staying with my youngest and his partner and their newest - a little guy who was born the end of March. Yay!

Theme? Writing and Life is what comes to me... how to balance the writing life with the other tugs you may have...

The ABCDEaria of the Writing Life -


I is for Idle 
Yep, idle! You heard me. If you are an artist - a writer, director, painter, game-creator, cook, etc... then you must learn to be idle. If it doesn't come naturally that is. Er..hem. Those of us who were brought up with folks that are of the Scottish Presbyterian persuasion might still believe that being idle is just giving the devil a free pass to mess with our souls. We will have to work hard to embrace idleness. Hope you got the weirdness in that sentence. That's how we can fool the real demons - those ancestral voices that tell us to put our heads down and be productive. We can make achieving idleness a project! 

And why do we need to be idle? Because that is where our creativity comes from.  We need to be quiet, still, and let those ideas percolate. We need to give the seeds of our creations some dark nurturing loamy earth to sprout from. That is what idleness provides. If you have folks that you live with who don't get this then you will have to improvise when caught idling. If your husband or mother or boss (agh!) enters the room where you are supposed to be 'working' and sees you upside down in the easy chair (what? you don't do this? it is essential) then you must figure out your back story. To husband saying "I was just thinking about when we can fix those storm gutters," will cause him to back out pretty quickly. To mother suggesting "I'm doing this because my doctor said it might help with the migraines," will do the trick. As for your boss - there you are on your own! Perhaps being idle at your day job isn't such a good idea.

When we are trying to balance a life of art with a family life the need for idleness can sometimes be forgotten. You MUST schedule it in that case - otherwise you'll be all hat and no cattle. You'll look busy but you won't have the necessary to create with.

There is a goal and there is a sheet of ice. One must move the puck over the empty ice to get to the goal. Okay terrible metaphor but I don't have my usual stock of photos to play with.