Reading: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. The Ender saga is one of the few works by Card that I haven't read.

Paying Attention

The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

--Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

I've fallen behind in my Artist's Way program, having lost most of the past week to Harry Potter, a set of master pages, Hurricane Floyd, and general procrastination. Today I read over the chapter I should have read last Sunday, worked on some of the exercises, and did my morning pages for the first time in several days.

Morning pages, the cornerstone of the AW program, are three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing and are supposed to be done first thing every day. Rapid writing without judging or editing or even rereading is supposed to channel away all the petty, whiny, niggling little thoughts that get in the way of creativity.

Unfortunately, writing the morning pages is also the part of the program I hate the most.

First of all, my morning pages could more appropriately be described as "afternoon" pages. I can barely manage to drag myself out of bed in time to get us all dressed, fed, and out the door. I can't--OK, won't--get up a half hour early each day to do morning pages. So I do them in the afternoon after the twins go to their room for a nap. Even so, it is rare that I can get all the way through three pages without having to stop and break up a fight or let them out of their beds to go use the bathroom.

My biggest problem with the morning pages is that Cameron insists that they must be done by hand. I hate, hate, HATE writing anything by hand. This loathing is partly due to detestable Sister Cecilia and her taunts about my penmanship. I don't even like looking at my abominable, illegible handwriting.

Mostly, however, I hate how long it takes me to get the ideas out of my head, down my arm to my fingers, out of the pen, and onto the page. I can type much faster than I can handwrite, and I feel so stilted when I try to write anything by hand.

Still, Cameron is so insistent on the necessity of doing the morning pages by hand that I suppose there must be a good reason, even if I don't see it now. I told the folks in my Artist's Way group that I'd try doing them by hand for eight weeks, then re-evaluate. Maybe by then I'll feel happier about it.

One of the things I liked in this week's chapter was Cameron's story about her grandmother, who, despite a life full of troubles, managed to take pleasure in observing the world around her: paying attention, Cameron calls it.

I have a tendency to daydream my life away, to go though my days in a haze, lost in my own thoughts. Tab is alternately amused and exasperated by my absentmindedness. "Why can't you pay attention?" he'll grouse at me.

This chapter reminded me of something Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek. Dillard, a writer unexcelled in her ability to observe the natural world, remembered that when she was a child, she liked to hide a penny along the sidewalk for some passerby to find. She'd mark the sidewalks with arrows labeled "Surprise Ahead" and enjoyed thinking of someone finding the penny, a free gift from the universe.

As an adult, she equated those hidden pennies with other gifts that are there for the taking, if only we allow ourselves to notice them. She writes:

I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But--and this is the point--who gets excited by a mere penny?... [I]f you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

It is all about living in the here and now and being open to the little delights the world has to offer. My grandmother, too, had that ability. This journal is helping me learn to do the same. By writing nearly every day, I am forcing myself to pay attention to the little miracles around me: The sensation of breeze on my skin. The sound of dry leaves crunching under foot. The supple grace of Daniel in motion. The surprisingly deep timbre of Stephen's chuckle. Matthew's elfin smile. These are my pennies, and they have made me rich beyond compare.

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