As our loved ones undergo hard, painful treatments, there’s an undercurrent of sadness and fear that runs through our lives right now. I’m ashamed to say it, but for me the heaviness of it comes and goes. I’m at a remove from it all. These folks are really more P’s friends than mine. I never met his dad. So I’m able to go to work, make my dinner, ride my bike, and be happy in the day to day. Then, it rises up. Someone says something that makes me think of our friends.  I remember it’s chemo day.  I see it in P’s eyes.  That’s when I feel it most. I can’t say anything wise or insightful. Mostly I just try to be present, but here are some resources that we’ve come across that seem to help.  Maybe they’ll speak to you, or someone you know, too.

If you’re ready to cry, watch One Week. It’s quite good, and portrays one young man’s struggle to accept a dire prognosis. For me, the movie was more cathartic than practically helpful–a way of accessing some of the fear and sadness that we don’t know how to deal with on a daily basis.  It’s also just a beautiful film: stunning photography, gorgeous shots of Canada’s landscape, and some real, hard, touching relationships.

We’re reading Anticancer, by David Servan-Schreiber.  It is easy to read and very informative. In fact, it’s fascinating. I’m learning all kinds of things about how cancer works in the body, what an epidemic it’s become, and also that there’s WAY more we can do about it than I ever knew.

I thought that genetics were the biggest determining factor if an individual was to develop cancer or not. Turns out, what we eat, how much we exercise, what chemicals we are exposed to, and even how happy we are, all influence whether or not cancer will develop, and if it does develop, these factors can make a big difference on the healing process.

Finally, here are some life lessons for all of us from cancer survivors. These are from an article by Lissa Rankin MD, called “10 Things I Learned From People Who Survive Cancer” on the site Crazy Sexy Life. I encourage you to check out both the post and the site in situ, but these are too good not to re-post. So pardon the copy & paste and read them now.

1. Be unapologetically YOU. People who survive cancer get feisty. They walk around bald in shopping malls and roll their eyes if people look at them funny. They say what they think. They laugh often. They don’t make excuses. They wear purple muumuus when they want to.

2. Don’t take shit from people. People who survive cancer stop trying to please everybody. They give up caring what everybody else thinks. If you might die in a year anyway (and every single one of us could), who gives a flip if your great aunt Gertrude is going to cut you out of her will unless you kiss her ass?

3. Learn to say no. People with cancer say no when they don’t feel like going to the gala. They avoid gatherings when they’d prefer to be alone. They don’t let themselves get pressured into doing things they really don’t want to do.

4. Get angry. Then get over it. People who survive cancer get in your face. They question you. They feel their anger. They refuse to be doormats. They demand respect. They feel it. Then they forgive. They let go. They surrender. They don’t stay pissed. They release resentment.

5. Don’t obsess about beauty. People who survive cancer no longer worry about whether they have perfect hair, whether their makeup looks spotless, or whether their boobs are perky enough. They’re happy just to have boobs (if they still do). They’re happy to be alive in their skin, even if it’s wrinkled.

6. Do it now. Stop deferring happiness. People who survive cancer realize that you can’t wait until you kick the bucket to do what you’re dying to do. Quit that soul-sucking job now. Leave that deadbeat husband. Prioritize joy. They live like they mean it.

7. Say “I love you” often. People who survive cancer leave no words left unspoken. You never know when your time is up. Don’t risk having someone you love not know it.

8. Take care of your body. People who survive cancer have a whole new appreciation for health. Those who haven’t been there may take it for granted. So stop smoking. Eat healthy. Drink in moderation. Maintain a healthy weight. Avoid putting toxic poisons in your God pod. Get enough sleep.

9. Prioritize freedom. People who survive cancer know that being a workaholic isn’t the answer. Money can’t buy health. Security doesn’t matter if you’re six feet under. Sixteen hours a day of being a stress monster is only going to make you sick. As Tim Ferriss writes in “The 4-Hour Workweek,” “Gold is getting old. The New Rich are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”

10. Take risks. People who survive cancer have faced their fear and told it to go to hell. They know life is for living. Fear is powerless. And joy lies in taking risks. So go skydiving if you want. Bungee jump. Hang glide. Spend your savings. Live like you might die tomorrow.

man·i·fest/ˈmanəˌfest/

One of the tasks the counselor has given me is to identify my beliefs.  I recoiled at first; I did not want to talk about God. But no, what she meant by beliefs spread far beyond faith. She meant for me to identify what I value, what I put stock in, how I see the world. It might not be how The World works, but it’s how my world works.  Identifying them wasn’t about creating them–they’ve developed through my lifetime–but about becoming clear what they already are. As such, they may change over time, but not overnight. These beliefs can then be the foil off of which I reflect incidents in my life. When anxiety arises, I can look at those beliefs and ask myself: with what belief am I not living in accordance to give rise to this anxiety?

To be honest, I’m not sure how it all works yet.  I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to calm my anxiety with this method. I am sure, however, how amazing sitting down and creating my list of beliefs has been. It’s been invigorating and inspiring. Some beliefs lead to more beliefs, others lead to more questions. All of it feels exciting, significant, and imperative.

Even more amazing has been sitting with these beliefs for a couple months now and seeing the ways they ring true over and over again. They have given me ground to stand on. And whether it was creating the beliefs, or the counseling, or sleeping better, or what, I seem to be (dare I say it out loud?) developing a new sense of self, or at least, a new ability to listen to myself. I’m able to hear, and honor, and follow through on my needs more easily these days. I think this change comes from being clearer in my own head and heart about what matters to me and how I operate.

So here goes. For posterity. In case I forget.

My manifesto.

1) I believe in love. I believe it exists. I believe that what promotes it is good, and what discourages it is bad.

2) I believe all things are interconnected. I believe that each of us affects the others, that my being, and yours, is linked to everything else. Whether it’s the molecules of air I breath, the actions I take, or the energy I put into the world, all is bound.

3) I believe in language.  I believe in the power of our words to create our reality, to direct our thoughts, and to affect othes. I believe our words have consequence, and thus we should choose them wisely.

4) I believe in integrity. I believe that who I am at home alone should align with who I am at work with who I am at the bar with friends with who I am as a coach with who I am with P. in our bedroom. Not that I have to behave identically in each setting, but that who, or how, I am remains consistent and true; that I could stand behind each of those behaviors, knowing it fit with my beliefs.

Pursuant to these beliefs, others fall into place. Believing that what promotes love is “good” means I believe in good and bad, right and wrong; all the while knowing that good people can do bad things, bad things can be done for the right reasons, and good things can be done at the wrong time. Add in #4 Integrity, and I think doing good things (like speaking kind words, #3) for the right reasons is best, and what I should strive for always. Believing in interconnectedness and integrity means I believe our actions have power, that they impact the world, and so we should weigh them, as our words, carefully.

I think of my philosophy major brother and all the probing, challenging things he would say right about now. He would throw Kant, Wittgenstein, and Kirkegaard at me, and I would feel insignificant–embarrassed by my simple faiths. But part of what I’ve come to realize in the last few weeks is that Kant, Wittgenstein, and Kirkegaard don’t matter. I’d love to read what they had to say, and they (as well as poets, painters, and activists) are part of the reason beliefs can change over time, but right now, this is it. What it is tomorrow may be different, but I have got to own what is true and real, now.

What is digital humanities?  Having been out of the English Lit/Theory world for close to 10 (10!) years now, I will take this expert at his word:

“the ‘digital humanities,’ [is] an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.”

His next column gets more in depth—digging into what distinguishes traditional humanities from this new digital iteration. Fish starts by contrasting his career, which he’s staked on“building arguments that are intended to be decisive, comprehensive, monumental, definitive and, most important, all mine,” to blogs, which are “provisional, ephemeral, interactive, communal, available to challenge, interruption and interpolation, and not meant to last.”

The way Fish lays out these differences sheds light on my own desire for originality and my sometimes struggle to write. Trained in this traditional, scholarly, author-based world where unique, well-researched, substantial argument was prized above all else, that is the standard I have continued to hold for myself. Part of what handicaps me from even finishing a paragraph, let alone a poem or an essay, is the sense that it isn’t substantial, comprehensive, or original.

But the “digital humanities” seem to be prizing exactly the opposite qualities.  Instead of trying to be singular, the new humanities are part of a community of authorship.  Instead of striving for permanence, they are meant to be ever changing.  Fish explores all this in depth, so I don’t really need to rehash it.  What has caught me off-guard is that I find this new “text in process” that he describes both liberating, and false.

In terms of blog posts, I find great freedom in the idea that the “text” is impermanent, fleeting, and mulit-voiced. I’m able to write most prolifically when I don’t have to work too hard for it, when it’s just my ramblings linked to all kinds of other people’s ramblings. It’s also, actually, quite reassuring to know that with time these posts will simply sink to the bottom of the digital refuse heap: this is their fate no matter how “good” they are, so I don’t have to worry too much about them either way.

Yet when it comes to poems, or works of literature or scholarship, I find this idea of “text in process” contrived and trivializing. I sure hope that my blog does not mirror the fate of all written word. Are Paradise Lost and Romeo and Juliet, Lolita and Blood Meridian to be taken as lightly and discarded as quickly as blog posts in this new era of digital humanities?

I buy that new texts, “blogs, links, hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities and much more,” have different rules than traditional ones; that there’s more at play, more voices, perhaps, and more change and immediacy than there used to be. But how different is this than Milton’s allusions to the Bible or Shakespeare’s allusions to Milton? According to Fish, the digital humanities claim to offer a “decentralized author”:

Mark Poster draws the moral: “[T]he shift … to the globally networked computer is a move that elicits a rearticulation of the author from the center of the text to its margins, from the source of meaning to an offering, a point in a sequence of a continuously transformed matrix of signification”

But is this idea new?  Didn’t the “myth of the stand-alone author” officially die 90 years ago when Eliot acknowledged the power of tradition over the poet? Isn’t it common sense that the “author” doesn’t write in a vacuum, and yet there is still someone who can take responsibility for putting the words together?

Fish presents the vision of digital humanities as theological and revolutionary, in that they want to overthrow mortality by ridding us of linearity, “of having a beginning, middle and end, which is what sentences, narratives and arguments have.” But doesn’t making sense require some kind of logic, some chain of thought that can be followed? If not, why have I been working on this blog post for 3 days? Why didn’t I just post all the quotations that seemed interesting to me, smushed in between some thoughts at random, and let it all speak for itself?

For me, the heart of the matter is that literature matters. Art matters. And it’s different than a blog.  It is longstanding, monumental, and significant. In the words of Carol Quillen during her inauguration as the new president of my alma mater, Davidson College:

“I am a humanities professor. When professors like me read Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,’ or God’s speech from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, when we read Toni Morrison’s description in Beloved of an African’s experience in a slave ship, or when we recall the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid, when we watch Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful, or see Romeo and Juliet, or stare at Picasso’s Guernica, or listen to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach’s Cello Suites, when we have these experiences, we are moved. These words and images and sounds reach into us, unsettle and transform us in ways difficult to describe, and we are wiser and stronger because we have opened ourselves to these challenging works of art. And when we communicate to others what we have experienced through our encounters with these works, new knowledge gets produced.”

I don’t have any pretense that my blog is literature, or scholarship, or that it matters. That’s not what it’s meant to be.  But I do believe some writing is all that, even in this digital age. It seems obvious to me that some texts last longer than others, that there might be multiple influences and multiple references, that some texts might take on new and challenging structures and change over time, but none of this seems particularly new or revolutionary, and none of it eliminates the existence of significant work that remains important despite the passage of time.

Perhaps all of this new digital humanities jive is just about digital works, not traditional ones. In which case the original contrast (impermanent vs. permanent) stands and makes sense to me. Or are the digital humanities making claims about all humanities?  I am curious to see what Fish’s next column/post will be about . . . will he refute the claims of the digital humanities?  Will he bolster them?  Put them in context?

For now, I will take comfort in the insignificance of this post. I will feel reassured that any attempts at understanding current or past literary theory aren’t serious—for they are not meant to be longstanding nor definitive. This will matter only as long as it’s the first at the top of blog. And for my own sake, I’ll keep trying to figure out what matters most and how to keep stringing words together in a linear fashion so they make sense, even if they are only digital.

For instance, in trying to write this one blog post, I have started and deleted the first paragraph at least five times. I want to write about originality, or mattering, and even in trying to do so I fear my unoriginality, and my not mattering. The cycle is debilitating, and so here I am self-consciously writing about writing, again, trying to push the words forward to a point.

*          *          *

I wanted to write about poems.  Every so often, there are moments when I am drawn to verse. My words call for line breaks. My mind is stuck in its loop, stuck on an image that seems to resonate with meaning.

I sit down to play the image out, to see what might come of it. Inevitably the critic speaks up. She tears each line to shreds. She asks pointedly, “So what?” The ideas I express are trite, my verbage cliche. I stutter in half-phrases through my sentimentality. The critic scoffs at the lameness of it all. The book closes. The words go away. I never go back.

In college, the stuttering was the first draft. Then there was revision. Then workshop. Then my professor’s comments. Then rewriting, and repeat. Some time during the second winter after graduation I had to face the hard, but important, realization that, alone, I wasn’t committed to that process. Alone, the stuttering was as far as I could get.

Fragments of images, of emotions, of myself are littered through journals buried in basements and on bookshelves in Minnesota and Colorado. I wonder sometimes if there is something hiding amid the debris. Perhaps if I could revive the process, the revisions and the critiques, I might say something original, something that mattered. Most of the time it’s just easier to ignore the whole endeavor and choose not to care, neither about the fragments nor any completed product.

*          *          *

Today, pulled into another piece-meal loop of imagery, I wonder about redefining what matters in my writing. Perhaps the significance is in the unoriginality–that these experiences are common and shared. Perhaps I can celebrate that I am part of this collective, and not be focused on striving for distinction. More than that, perhaps I can accept that I am not trying to stir the hearts of strangers. I am simply facing what many an almost-thirty year old woman faces, and I am trying to make sense of it in my own way.

Perhaps writing won’t be so stuttering if I can re-envision my process; instead of focusing on product, focus on sorting out myself.  Perhaps that is a process I can commit to, because it comes from within. The critic becomes defunct. Others’ opinions don’t matter. The words are for themselves, the images for my own satisfaction. Then perhaps I can finish a poem–make more than a fragment—get to a truth that will fit in my pocket, something simple for my own keeping.

For years I thought New Year’s resolutions were stupid–we should be resolving to be better people all the time, not just once a year. I’ve since come around. While I still think self-awareness and -improvement is always healthy, the ritual of the new year marks the time. It gives us that elbow in the ribs, reminding us to slow down, to look around, to take stock of what’s going on in our hearts, our minds, and our lives.

I started resolving things years ago in a cabin in the Northwoods of Minnesota with four extraordinary women, but we didn’t call them “resolutions.” We wrote down, shared, and then burned (yes, burned . . . we really like ritual) things we wanted to let go of and things we wanted to hold onto for the new year.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a post that explicitly included my significant other, but  here goes, because I make Resolutions now in large part because of him. Last winter was my first new year with P. He turned to me as midnight neared and asked me what my resolutions were. On the spot I started brainstorming. He did the same. It ended up being this wonderful moment of sharing what we hoped for, of saying who we want to be in the coming year. While we see each other daily, this was a chance to articulate, clearly and out loud, what we wanted for ourselves. Throughout 2011 he held me to these resolutions, and they became more than momentary good intentions; thanks in part to him, they continued as a pole star off of which to gauge my progress, my position.

Now we’re at 2012, and we have a new set of resolutions. Again, we created them on the spot, but they’ve morphed over the last two days as we spin them around in our heads. To get our brain juices moving, we came up with suggestions for how to make resolutions.

1) Something you can achieve in the first week.
2) Something for others.
3) Something within yourself.
4) Something you want more of.
5) Something you want less of.

Mine don’t strictly follow that rubric, but they range from big to small, concrete to abstract.

• I want to get my left foot out of my mountain bike pedals faster.
• I want to have more fun when I ride with others and not worry so much about my performance.
• I want to start a retirement account (it’s awfully embarrassing to admit that at 30 I don’t have one, but it’s an intimidating process to undertake seeing as I have no employer plan to guide me).
• I want to find real joy and satisfaction in an activity that is not physical. I think this means investing myself in a project of some sort: learning something new, art, writing, cooking . . . something that is more than just passing time.
• I want to find a place of calm and quiet in which to abide. I want to live more grounded, less anxious.

So far, that’s it. If they morph, I’ll try to update them. It’s scary, and kind of nice, to have them “published” in this public space–one more layer of accountability. Now the task is to figure out how to make these resolutions reality.

Not so recently, now, he wrote about stepping to the edge of your comfort zone, and then taking one step more. This post hit a particular chord with me. As a new biker last summer I found myself daily facing obstacles I wasn’t sure I could surmount. I rode over boulders then tipped over on pebbles, exactly because I reached that point “where your wheels will no longer role” and it became all about balance and finesse.

I’ve written before about working the transitions–about how grace on a bike can be a metaphor for grace in life. Here, Mike points out that subtle transition from upright to over, “got it” to “don’t got it,” and how riding that fine line of comfort and discomfort gets us to a place where we are entirely focused, totally present.

On the bike I have found those moments of presence–when my awareness of the bike disappeared and there was simply movement. One second I was here, facing rocks or turns or jumps, and the next I was through it. Fear and the incessant mind chatter about whether I was good enough or not, disappeared. We were at the top of the Doctor’s downhill, then I was through it, and thrilled.

Biking aside, this is what I’m striving for these days. Presence. Focus. Peace. I’ve given myself space for quiet and found there the deafening, obsessive voice of anxiety and criticism. So I’m looking into my toolkit and pulling out my tools, old and new, to try to redirect that voice. I don’t just want to smother it anymore. I’m realizing that for years I think I’ve been just coping; if I didn’t want to hear it, I made sure never to be quiet. I made sure I was beyond “good enough” in every external way I could from academics to athletics and beyond. But now, I don’t want to keep filling time and space with endless, pointless striving. I’m trying to face that voice. It’s been awful to realize how ever-present she is, but it’s also been amazing to start to imagine there might be another way. Presence. Focus. Peace.

How does one engage with a blog, when the words bring nothing but confusion?

Walk away from it. Or. Start small. Focus on something small. Ask only one fraction of a question, and allow the answers, without judgement. Allow small, partial answers.  And maybe relinquish the words entirely.

Seeds Become Plants

Immersion Therapy

Beauty Requires Seeing

There is Solace, Even When We Can't See It

Bold is Fleeting