My lives seem to converge when I am on the bike in a spin class. Lives? Yes - my creative/spiritual and my grounded/family/work lives. I like to think that I am spinning in the right direction.
"But you're not going anywhere!" You exclaim.
Exactly. I am rooted to the present, and yet I am taking care of mind, body AND spirit. I had thought that I could only get that in a yoga class, but I was wrong.
I discovered the SPIN in a last ditch attempt to add cardio to my routine. Being a yoga aficionado, I had hated everything else I tried. I shocked myself by falling in-love. I love that the music is LOUD and that it is dark with no mirrors, that you can get into the ZONE. In fact, the experience is kind of like a part of my nightclub days, when I would just dance and be in my own little world. (Léna Land as my friends liked to call it.) I love the blood, sweat and tears.
So of course I've been thinking a lot about spinning a a metaphor for writing.
It's been helping me think about writing as a process and not a destination - and yes, you're right - in a spin class we don't really literally go anywhere. But we follow through until the end, strengthening out heart muscles and our legs, sweating the built up toxins out of our pores. As a byproduct, we feel more awake, alert, ALIVE during the day.
It's like that with writing - it makes me feel alive as it clears my head. There are toxins in my spirit as well that I exOrcise through writing: the world can be a troubling place, full of suffering and inequality. I am drawn to people AND characters who have had enough darkness and who struggle in their search for the light.
And writing grounds me in the present, even as I move from room to room, coffee shop to coffee shop in search for a fresh perspective. Right now I am working on a new "thing", and I have stopped thinking about any kind of audience so that I can find the story, so that I can spin my yarn. I have a setting, and the shadows of some characters. A plot is slowly revealing itself to me. Our new slogan at Writopia Lab is: Plot builds character.
I know that the events and actions I have taken in my own life have built my own character, so I keep writing, and I urge you to do the same, and to eschew compartmentalization by merging your writing life with your other daily activities.
We are writers everywhere, even in a spin class!
Yes, we are all spinning in the right direction.
