If all work and no play did no favours for Jack (or Jill), unremitting earnest worthiness doesn’t do a lot for any of us either.
We work hard. We take our jobs seriously. We try our very best to be the best we can be. We are answerable, accountable, responsible, reliable, dependable – even though, half the time, it seems that no one notices this assortment of ‘ables’ of which we are so cap-able.
We pay bills, we raise children, we care for our parents; we try to be good partners, good companions, we remember to feed the cat or walk the dog (nearly) every day. We pay our taxes, licence our cars, recycle our trash, remember birthdays, cut back on calories and social media and energy consumption and wine while trying to get enough exercise and find the time for enough sleep (because we know that’s good for us).
For all the right reasons, our lives can become a repetitive and stressful chore. In the end, we crack, first we dream of small escapes like sick days or holidays and then we crave larger escapes like new jobs, new careers or new relationships because ‘new’ re-sets the worthy clock for a while until the cycle of accountability settles heavily upon us once more.
I often think of that seminal Ken Robinson video and I can picture him saying ‘she’s a dancer’, can still feel my throat start to tighten so many years after hearing that genius storyteller reminding us all that we have creative children within us, who think having fun and playing are important things. We learn to silence our inner children as cruelly as Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter sever daemon’s from their young captives in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights.
In our states of worthiness, the mantra of mindfulness can become another tiresome task that we have to fit amongst the other tasks. Persuading some of the people that I’ve worked with or coached to slow down, take a break, find some ‘you time’ is often just whistling in the wind. They might take a weekend off and enjoy it but they rarely, in my experience, change their fundamental behaviours towards burning through tasks as if their life depended upon it. Actually, their lives depend upon them changing.
Easy to say but how to do it? How do you take the time to find the beautiful and creative child that lives inside you (with all the other things that you’re supposed to be doing….)?
A few weeks ago, completely at random, I was lucky enough to come across an opinion piece on the CNN website. The author was a poet, Tess Taylor, and her piece was entitled How 17 syllables a day can change your life . I don’t know why I stopped to read this but I did and within this article I found a potentially life changing habit.
Simply, the habit is to write a haiku poem every day. Stick with me…17 syllables, a couple of stylistic conventions. How hard can that be? Writing seventeen syllables is writing this sentence once a day.
What are the rules? Well haiku is descended from a traditional Japanese form whose origins date back hundreds of years. I’m not an expert, thousands of pages have been written about it and there are different conventions but I stick to just four.
- The seventeen syllables are written in three lines in a five, seven, five distribution.
- There is a bare minimum of punctuation with the exception of a ‘cutting’ punctuation to split the verse.
- Where I can, I refer to the seasons – but this is a bit restrictive so I don’t always do it.
- There is no rhyming, the phrase shouldn’t have a start or an end but almost appear to be lifted from something longer, a passing observation.
After reading Tess’ article (which I really recommend), I wrote my first haiku just as a bit of fun. I didn’t like writing them at school, I liked using lots of words in my over-flowery writing and I found the haiku form far too restrictive but I had a go. It was a grey morning, 3rd January.
low place of the year
how odd, against the window
a fly still buzzing
When you try, it’s a lot harder than it looks. You need to concentrate. You need to ask yourself, ‘what am I thinking about?’ You need to notice things. You need to think about syllables, some words fill a whole line – like encyclopaedia – others are monosyllabic so you can say more. Sometimes they tumble out of you, sometimes only stillness will bring something to mind. Small things make brilliant haiku.
red truck beside an
old green bin makes christmas in
a glass reflected
That was January 9th and already I’d started to look forward to my haiku time. I found myself composing them in the shower, when I was out running and then cursing when I got home and had lost some inspirational mare’s tail. I found myself looking at the world and making what I saw into haiku.
outside, setting sky
is a paradigm of blue;
stairway to the night
I’ve written at least one verse every day for more than 10 weeks now. It’s become the diary I never kept. I can read back each verse and remember exactly what I was thinking when I wrote it. Here a cold morning on January 17th:
gold on white, sun on
frost; patches melt while the birds
practise their skating
The next day a trip into Birmingham:
street churns around me;
on every face a script that
changes in a blink
After a couple of weeks, I had an idea – I have a friend in Tasmania who loves words and I invited her to be my haiku buddy. She jumped at the idea and we shared each other into google docs. I read her verse diary unfolding and she reads mine. It’s absolutely fascinating – our styles, subject materials, writing habits, everything are totally different. We don’t comment on each other’s verses, we just share our daily observations like two kids in a backyard.
And that’s why I’m sharing this rather unusual blog: I want to share the secret. To write like this, you have to be mindful, you have to be quiet, you are being creative, you do engage with you, your self, your feelings, your child. Along the way, you create a beautiful artefact to keep, to cherish and maybe to share.
Obviously I like to write or I wouldn’t be writing blogs but this isn’t about writing. It’s about finding a small focused space to find out what you’re feeling. I don’t have any apprehension about sharing what I’ve written, my haiku are neither good nor bad, they aren’t written for praise or admiration, they’re the by-products of mindful playing – which makes them all beautiful in the way that a child’s drawing is beautiful.
My haiku buddy, Theresa, gave me permission to share some of her beautiful drawings too.
In my dreams I am
a poet. Then the rustle
of being intrudes.
Need to jettison
our stuff. Life acquisitions
of baubles and boasts.
Not Valentines but
our anniversary. Calls
across space. Love hours.
This may resonate or it may not. If it does – try it for a couple of weeks, see if you find the happy place that I found and that Tess describes in her article as a place that helped her through a dark time in her life. One day you might feel poetic…
old ginger root, earth
twisted your crippled hand, and put
fire in your fingers
…or another day you might feel playful…
a dark rendezvous,
sensual, intimate; my
lover, chocolate
…but more importantly, you get to spend some time with the one precious child that all too often gets overlooked amongst all the grown up worthiness.
It would be wonderful to see your haiku in the comments section…want to play?
