377 Days - Blog #55, Epiphany

So today was not the day I planned it to be.  If you read this blog on Wednesday, you would have noted that I had full intentions of attending stART on the Street.  But after a NUMBER of details, the proverbial camel’s back breaking straw of a torrential downpour, ended up making this a day at home.  I could make excuses and rationalizations for that choice… but I am sorry I let the weather keep my small inventory of books and me away from a stellar community festival.  Just not sorry enough to say the day was wasted.

Mostly I just cleaned house… which let me clean house in my brain.  I finally found a place for all the pieces I took from my old car and deposited on the coffee table a week ago.  I cleaned off the kitchen table.  Why do tables always attract clutter?  Are they just magnets for paper that should go to recycling or coins that can go in the coin jar or those stupid little items that seem a crime to throw away, but equally silly to hold onto… for what reason?

I wrote lengthily in my journal.  I told myself I would spend some of the day writing if I wasn’t helping to promote our writers’ group.  Indeed, I actually found myself writing about that very thing and pondering the entire subject of how one promotes writing.

It is something on which I found a shift in attitude as I was writing a blog last week.  And it provokes another item on that oft mentioned list.

#25.  Sell more books.  

That’s the basic, basic summary of the goal.  But, really, it is about changing how I think of my writing – or any art… or even as I found myself dumping my soul in my journal… I think of myself as a person with whom any other person wants to spend time.  It requires unhinging myself from self-absorption.  No let me re-phrase that.  It requires me seeing the art as separate from myself.  That my perception is not the one and total truth.  The thing I create belongs as much to the audience as it does me.  And therefore, their opinion and enjoyment or lack thereof is equally as valid as my insecurity, pretend humility, blind adoration, five years later oh my goodness what was I thinking when I did that perspective.

Is that too heady to comprehend?  I’m not sure.  Because I am trying, very much, to understand how to articulate this.  Not just for your sake, dear Reader.  But for my own… because I think it is going to change how I … well, live.

But here.  Let me put this in plainer speak.  You may have noticed, if reading this series of blogs with any regularity, that I strive to put down in words a positive thing or three about every play I see this year.  It redirects my thought process as I sit in the audience away from the urge to say, what don’t I like about this because I would do things differently were I involved (something of which I think a great many theater people are guilty).  Instead, I just simply… enjoy.

The funny thing is, though, that no matter what… the friends you go to see and support in these plays are insistent upon saying what went wrong.  Why the performance for which I paid a certain amount of my budget and gave up hours (hours that will provoke me to stay up later so I can write this blog) was not the absolute best it could be in that moment on that night with all the elements of the day and the universe that blended together for that once in a lifetime opportunity of that show and cast and theater.  Granted, at the end of the show, my ability to speak and celebrate remains limited to the mind still marinating response of, “I had fun.  I liked it.  It was good.”  

But theater people.  Writers.  Women who have a new haircut.  We all have this trained reaction – this proactive necessity of apology to answer a compliment, to respond to someone who appreciates our accomplishment with… yeah, well, I could be better.  And this experience you had… well, it could be better.  Not considering the fact AT ALL that the moment is perfect just because it is the moment when that friend saw, read, reacted and had all her day’s emotions swimming inside her head to provoke that perception.

Okay, maybe this is still too heady.

I’m basically realizing that… no, it isn’t me.  It is about you.  In the good way.

Of course, if I really were to put that lesson to practice, I wouldn’t have bailed on the festival today in favor of not getting wet… and not selling wet books.  Maybe there is someone out there who likes the rippled effect of 400 some pages getting soaked by a heavy downpour.