The virtues and joys of being still

Because for the first time in almost 15 years I am allowing myself the luxury of not actively soliciting work I am able to bask in stillness Since I moved to Tramin in June last year I had been shouldering a thricemultiplied workload that included my steady gigs in addition to sporadic new commitments I couldnt afford to refuseInevitably I felt like I had strained my voice by demanding more from it than was within its range without pausing to refuel I felt burnt out like I had exhausted all the poetic potential energy that I depend upon to nurture my writingA month ago as soon as I was able to clear my plate I decided to take a cue from the winter landscape around me and let myself lie fallow I wanted to inhabit the emotive state implicit in lying low retreating I wanted to be like the trees that used the time span of autumn to shed themselves of excessive leaves in order to conserve themselves by sustaining that which is truly vitalIt isnt that I hadnt made previous attempts at stillness They were however all doomed because I lacked the discipline that can only be evolved through selflove I set myself up for creative failure by putting too much pressure on myself to constantly perform under unrealistic deadlinesI catered to the capitalist conditioning that idolises busyness as inherently virtuous I even rewarded myself for actively pursuing work over other commitments sacrificing time that could have been spent frivolously in order to fondle my anxieties and states of selfdoubtIn the last few weeks I have been building my archive It is the kind of work I have normally only done for other people and that I never cared to do for my own practice To do justice to the endeavour I saved up some money and hired someone to help me with this task because it felt too daunting to be performed aloneEvery day I watch the master spreadsheet swell in size as more links are being continually added I spend every second day trying to remember stories I wrote ages ago The selfcommissioned project is helping me restore all the many versions of my selfhood all the multiplicity I embodied in different contexts and environments Its an exercise in maintaining an inventory of my creative practice It is happening parallel to my taking stock of the research and writing I have already done as part of the process of writing the sequel to A Handbook for My LoverBefore me on the shelf in front of my desk sits at all times a collection of twenty journals that contain a significant portion of my writing in the form of notes fragments excerpts from books Ive read and enormous reading lists They evidence my continuing engagement with the world around meI have been foraging through them to rediscover the various trails they contain to the many lines of thought Im wrestling with from the ideological conception of feeding to female jouissance to my ongoing obsession with the secret discourses of housewives Rummaging through segments I find myself returning to certain scenes of thought and reconfronting them from the precipice of forgetting As I retake the notes I made years ago I rearrange them in my current journal and uncover new meanings Its an exhilarating undertaking I like to notice my recently cultivated disregard for thoughts by others that must have impressed me at the time at which I first recorded themA good example is this quote by Henry David Thoreau that must have left a past impression mdash Write while the heat is in you The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with He cannot inflame the minds of his audience I rewrote this in my current journal and at the bottom I wrote RubbishI have spent the past two years actively practising delay not so much as a tactic for collecting thought but as a way of absorbing words It has something to do with allowing a phrase or even a sentence to breathe and evolve before it is recorded Instead of writing from a source of heat I have been allowing my thoughts to live within my being without feeling insecure that I will forget themThis shift in terms of temporality has had a direct consequence in terms of the targetted audience of my creative acts Writing is becoming increasingly a byproduct of intense living When the words finally assume form it is because they spill over onto the page Writing becomes a manifestation of my intellectual and emotional engagement with my self and its multifarious relations with the world around it Im writing from stillness not heat I want to transform rather than inflame my readers mindDeliberating on the life and times of Everywoman Rosalyn DMello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover She tweets RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paper