On Deciding

a list, a prayer, a self-reckoning

Bird in Weave, Beth Kephart

This coming Wednesday, I will be conducting a CraftTalk workshop focused on odes, lists, dots, and lines. The prose poem shared here is a test of my own theories. If you’d like to join me for this CraftTalk, the information is here. If you’d like to join Bill and me for an upcoming illustrated Juncture Workshop series (in June/July) focused on the art of seeing and writing, we’ve just added a second sharing session. Those details are here.

Deciding

Deciding on which song you will sing, which song will become your anthem.

Deciding on which acts of self-negation you will deploy to render yourself (in your own mind) noble. Until the next day, when you decide again, when you measure yourself against more (say it!) self-serving conventions. (Chocolate is fine. Bread with butter is fine. Cookies make life deeply worth living.)

Deciding on how much of the amateur in you will be tolerated by you before you cede to professional wisdom. Before the collateral damage of your frustration does not become collateral damage pinging the mind space of others.

Deciding on which blasphemies, indignities, slights, snubs, inequities, imbalances, aspersions, mockeries, cruelties, injustices you will endure, you will resist, you will call out, you will attend to, and how you will attend, and what it will cost, and with what currency you will pay for saying no, or no thank you, or that’s not what I said, or not now, please, or never again, do you hear me?

Deciding on which hours of the day you will retreat into yourself and which hours of the day you will call out to a lover, a child, a friend, a stranger, a beckoning. Deciding on the tone of your voice and on the division of labor between listening and speaking. Deciding on what, precisely, you will say, and what you will (God help you) not, and what you will wish, in the ensuing hours of the aftermath, you could excise from the transcript that you will (inevitably!) produce in your mind, even if smudging is probable, even if you are tempted (for the sake of your own argument) to remember wrong.

Deciding in advance to avoid chastising yourself for a conversation that has not yet transpired.

Deciding on forgiving, and with what grace.

Deciding on forgetting, and with what consequence.

Deciding on braving the cold, for others have braved so much worse.

Deciding on not puckering. Deciding on being more of less. Deciding on stopping here, on this line, because if you don’t, you will lose your own thread; you will snap like a spool of faded cotton.

More of my thoughts on the literary list can be found on this Brevity Blog essay.

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