"Frankly, It's Not Engaging"

I sat as if tied to my chair, watching as the Toyota truck pulled away.  I was motionless except for my hand which made its presence known to me from the corner of my eye. My hand was still except for slight bending of my fingers which was an attempt at some semblance of a wave.

 

I am having a difficult time putting into words what this felt like.

 

I could say “It felt bad” but that would tell you nothing. I am in the midst of reading Robert Bly’s book, Poems of Two-Fold Consciousness. In it, he describes this sort of labeling as a sign of the average writer’s unwillingness to be present and experience moments fully. Those of us who are communicators and use words as our medium need to show our readers more.

 

In my life work as a writing teacher, my students will tell you when I hear them respond to other’s writing with “I liked it” or “It was funny” my face turns slightly yellow and if they look closely, they can see the hair on my arms stand at attention. My lips purse and tighten around my jaw.

 

“I liked it” doesn’t communicate with the reader. “What was effective in the writing?” I will ask, teasing out more details or I may follow up with “What particular word combinations impacted you the most?”

 

This morning, alone, I settled back into my writing chair. I peered into the monitor in front of me and wrote myself back into the moment.

 

My hand, raised and motionless hung in the air. It was the punctuation mark at the end of a time of togetherness with my friend, David, at my favorite Bakersfield coffee house: Dagny’s. Visits with David are few and far between and in my estimation are never long enough.

 

My hand hung there, comma-like, begging the conversation to continue yet knowing some conversations will remain as fragments until I scoop them up on my own and allow them to become monologues in my soul development.

 

This choice works well. When I move in that direction, I recognize maybe it was meant to be a soul monologue from my heart to the page and then out to the world. It doesn’t mean on a certain level I would rather have the conversation continue, it means I have made whatever shows up to be the just right thing.

 

Settling back into that moment with my hand hanging in the air, it was as if the movement in my hand was praying, “let this be a comma between this conversation and another” yet I always know that next conversation may not appear. I choose, each time, to be grounded in the fact that whether or not that next conversation happens, I will be fine. I will be just right. I will continue to do what I have always done: put one foot in front of the other and move my pencil across the page.

 

It felt like hours as I sat there across from his now empty chair, breathing, quietly, motionless, my eyes smarting from tears sitting inside my eyelids.

 

These words say so much more than “It felt bad”, don’t they?

Reeve Lindbergh wrote, “(My mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh) taught us that any experience worth living through was worth writing about, but beyond this she made us feel that the act of writing about it significantly affected the experience itself. I did not know whether writing enhanced an event, transforming it into something more important than it would have been had it gone unrecorded, or whether simply writing made it more real, like the testimony of an observant bystander who can confirm, “Yes, something has indeed happened here. I am a witness. This is what I saw.”

I didn’t see “bad” I saw my hand, as a comma, and as I followed that imagery through my writing, had an “a-ha” what my hand wanted me to know.

I am guessing there is a message from my hand to you here as well.

This isn’t only for writers – this includes conversations, inner self-conversations, email writing, comments on facebook – everyplace you go you may communicate with people more meaningfully and discover insights that are begging to be seen so that your life may be improved.

My friend Coryn sent me a text message, asking how my visit with David went. I texted her back, saying “It was eye-opening, it was sacred, it was orange, it was too short, it made me laugh.”

You might say, “What do you mean, it was orange?”

Therein lies my point. The orange initiates more conversation, more connection, more interaction, more discovery.

I wish more of my visits were orange or purple or slightly overcast or covered with drizzle.

It says so much more than, “It was fine.” You might think of fine in this way: “Frankly, it’s not engaging.”

Today if someone asks you, “How was your day?” or “How is your daughter, Mabel?” or “How was work?” don’t respond to “fine” or “good” or “horrid” because those are not engaging words, those are not words that invite a motionless comma in the air. 

Instead, respond with descriptive words, even if you say, “It was Orange.”

I would rather have daily aching eye lids from the sweetness of stinging tears than a life tempered with dry-eyed mediocrity.

Activate Your Passion.

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 You may be saying "This is all well and good in the speaking, but I have no idea how to impliment this in my writing or my speaking or my living."

THis is one of the reasons I create my writing programs - to address soul change through communication.

Writing changes lives, lives are changed with writing - any form of writing. My two upcoming programs are examples of that - If you feel a tug from what you just read - you owe it to yourself to at least click on the links and consider joining us.. or just go ahead and register.

It would be an honor to work with you.

Preparing for the Writing Harvest - Week Long Writing Intensive Program:
begins this Monday, September 14.

http://bit.ly/xi9LB

Women's Autumn Writing Circle - begins September 23.

http://bit.ly/autumnwritingcircle

© 2009 – Julie Jordan Scott