Uninspired

So, what do you post when you’re uninspired?  Not just uninspired to write, uninspired by life?  No, nothing major has changed but you just don’t want to bother.   You look in your handy-dandy Ideas for Posts notebook and there are lists of unexplored inspiring and interesting topics but you are neither inspired or interested.  This week, I seem to have found two possibilities.  If you scroll down on Bud’s Blog … or look at Recent Posts in the sidebar … you’ll see that there were no Wednesday or Thursday posts, this after posting for 13 consecutive days.   Possibility one is post nothing.   Possibility two is post something I’ve committed to, like Monday Smiles, Top Sites Tuesday and Friday Favorites, something that takes effort but not inspiration, hence Alice Hoffman as my favorite author on Friday Favorites 8/20/2010.

This is a third possibility: post on being uninspired.  Jack London said, You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.  Since London was not only an author, but an adventurer and sailor, it’s not clear that he was just talking about writing.  And the truth is, if I’m uninspired by life, it’s doubly hard to be inspired to write.  At my Thursday Men’s Group, I described my malaise as having trouble appreciating the life I have as opposed to the life I imagined.  By nearly any standard, my life is very good but it isn’t perfect.  In the best of lives, there are difficult times and loss to be endured.  It seems to me that to be inspired all the time, you’d have to be delusional.  So, when it comes to life, how do you hunt down inspiration?  Well, talking and writing about my lack thereof is usually a good start, followed by acknowledgment that only I can do anything to get it back.  Frequently, when I look around, I notice nothing much in my life has changed much, just my state of mind or attitude, but at other times, I need to accept the changes that life has sent my way.  It helps to say I turn my life and will over to the care of God as a means of believing that there’s a purpose to what I’m going through, good or bad.  Sometimes, the path back to inspiration requires sticking doggedly to my routine … doing the next indicated thing … and at others, it requires temporarily breaking the mold.   (Yesterday, I got up early and went to the park, wrote my Morning Pages and worked out, then came home and posted Friday Favorites … my routine.  Then in the afternoon, my wife and I drove into L.A. to visit the Grammy Museum and went to happy hour at Yardhouse in L.A. Live, the new entertainment campus in Los Angeles … a complete change of venue).

When it comes to writing, my former writing teacher often downplayed the importance of Great Ideas for a Novel.   Paraphrasing, she said, Everyone has a good idea for a novel.  Good novels are mostly a product of hard work and persistence.   Inspiration is like that.  Don’t Hold Your Breath Waiting to Be Inspired to Write says Richard Nordquist in an article called The Myth of Inspiration on About.com which also includes supporting quotes from successful writers.   For me, hunting down inspiration as a writer requires very much the same steps as inspiration in life: accepting that I’m not always going to be inspired, doing the next indicated thing … posting Friday Favorites … or breaking my routine, skipping a few days then posting on being uninspired instead of being inspirational at the risk of being uninteresting.  It helps to say , as Julia Cameron recommends in The Artists Way … Okay, God, you take care of the quality. I will take care of the quantity.

Quoting one of my least favorite movie characters, That’s all I have to say about that.  Am I inspired yet?  No, but I’m less uninspired and I’m still wielding that club.

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Tags: 12 Steps, blogging, inspiration, Life, perspectives, sadness, spirituality, writing and blogging

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