Friday, April 4, 2014

D is for Discipline

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 is 12 days old today! 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 -


D is for Discipline

For those of you who have read me before you know I like to write about the paramitas and the writing life. Discipline is one of the paramitas. You can find it on my side-bar under the paramitas if you like - I won't go into it here - we all know what discipline is and I think it is scary for many people. It sounds punitive but that is wrong-headed. True discipline is a joy - it is the marriage between passion and work and what marries them is habit. I don't need to decide every day that I am going to walk for instance. I already decided that walking makes me sane so I will walk every day. I know that writing also keeps me sane so I will write every day. When I have revision to do I will make myself a schedule and I will make it workable and once I'm swinging along inside of that discipline, joy will arise. It just does. I don't have to discover that every time - I know it now and so I can keep on keeping on. If I decide that my discipline is balance then I know that I will have times when I naturally can do one thing more than the other and it will even out in the wash. It is easy for me to write in Labrador - a little trickier here but I will write these little essays, I will write my letter a day (a discipline I started on Oct.13th of last year), I will write in my journal and there will be a thread that keeps me in the writing life. Ah discipline - I loves ya!
 

5 comments:

Elizabeth Spann Craig said...

Great post, Jan! As a very disciplined person, I appreciate it, too...discipline too often gets a bad rap.

Anonymous said...

Jan - You put that so beautifully. Real discipline is a very healthy thing and actually nurtures passion. It allows passion to feed us while making us stronger. Terrific post!

Trisha said...

I think I'm kind of lacking in discipline right now. But at least I'm managing to visit people for the A to Z ... right? hehe

Mason Canyon said...

Discipline is something I need to work on. Great post, Jan.

Hart Johnson said...

I like the rethinking there--that discipline lets you out of having to constantly make decisions... you make it once and go with that, which is freeing, in a lot of ways. Discipline for me comes in spurts, but I definitely love how much more productive I am when I can get into the discipline of a routine. The BREAKS in that tend to come from outside.