Dear Erin,
I am looking to clear something up. Consider: What is the difference between Delusions of Grandeur and the concept behind having a Field Of Dreams? Said another way: What is the difference between being off your rocker and having the supposedly worthy ability of aiming for the moon? As a writer, I’ve become confused. It’s all this fiction wandering around in my head. It’s making a mess of things.
You see, do you ever do “this thing” where you have an idea for your life and then your brain takes hold of it and spins it out like Rumpelstiltskin with a pile of straw? On and on you go, figuring out the ands, ifs, and buts. Figuring out the whens, hows, and wheres. Figuring out the whereuntos and heretofores—as though you’re from another time period entirely, one that still uses all those words. But in the end you’re not really sure if you’re spinning gold or if you’re just moving a pile of straw from one side of a building to another.
Just me?
There’s this song that keeps rumbling through my head, courtesy of my youngest daughter and her insistence I put Disney mixes on the speakers whenever she’s around. I don’t really know the words, because mostly I ignore them, but there is one line that sticks out at me that goes something like this: “just do the next good thing.”
(Is it the next good thing? The next best thing? The next right thing? I feel like this is a question your daughter would know the answer to, but it seems much too bothersome to query Señor Google myself.)
Regardless, I get these delusions of grandeur/fields of dreams and my brain says: I know, I know, just do THE NEXT THING (entirely skipping the idea of good, or best, or right) because then, says my brain, somehow, somewhere, sometime I’ll be accomplishing SOMETHING.
It’s all so wrapped up in specificity and sense! Can’t you tell?
So I’m just wondering, Erin, and maybe you’ll have to ask your daughter, which would be fine by me, how is one supposed to know if one’s brain is engaged in moon aiming or if one’s brain should fall asleep in their rocker and take a nap instead? Because naps seems like good ideas too. Whoever said there was anything wrong with a nap? Certainly not me. I’m all for naps, and wouldn’t mind spending more time sleeping, if it’s actually the right thing to do.
The problem is, I am one of those people who watches a silly show about a family re-starting a farm in California (no link, I am not in a linking mood today) and becomes somewhat emotional at the idea that these people managed to have a goal and then actually make it happen. The concept is just so inspiring/jealousy provoking. I mean, in a total of 30 minutes (yes, I am aware of how cinematography works, and that it is messing with my mind, but allow me this statement) these people have taken a bunch of dirt and turned into an entire farming ecosystem. Sure, it actually took 10 years and they had to shovel a lot of poop, but what have I managed to do in the last 10 years?
Don’t worry, Erin. I don’t actually want to start a farm. I already have too many living organisms to tend at my house (evidence of having accomplished quite a bit in the last ten years, including shoveling poop). But I do want to make some of my goals actually hold up on the visible light spectrum instead of merely in my Dropbox files. And I am just not sure this “doing the next good/best/right thing” song is working for me right now.
Which brings me back to my original question about delusions of grandeur versus fields of dreams. How exactly does one choose which goals to do the next possible thing about? Does anyone have a Life Rubric lying about that they could loan me? I feel like it could be seriously useful here. I mean, if your daughter is going about being “They” all the time, can’t we get past wondering what the plot of your book is about and on to wondering what the plot of my life is about? People are always talking about the Muddled Middle and I’m just uninterested in hanging out here any longer. I need some direction about what the next whatever thing actually is.
Although it occurs to me now that the real question I’m asking (yes, it took me writing all of that, to get here) is whether it’s okay to keep having Delusions of Grandeur all the time if nothing actually comes of it? Whether it’s okay to keep insisting on planting seeds in my Fields of Dreams even if I don’t have any cinematographic evidence of a farm lying anywhere about—two dogs and a cat, yes, sheep and pigs, no. To put it simply: is it okay to keep spinning pile after pile of straw into what could possibly be gold when it could very well turn out to be yellow yarn that’s actually quite tangled?
Is all this wandering about in my dreams any more than just a waste of time?
I think the thing about writers, of course, is that we can’t help it, all that spinning. No matter how many times we debate its efficiency or usefulness. Being married, as I am, to an accountant, it has occurred to me often that not everyone feels or acts the same. Maybe other people just go about their days without imagining twenty-seven new things they could concoct before dinner. Maybe they’re able to sit in the here and now and build a contented life. Maybe they don’t constantly wander off in their brains into what could possibly be, if the world was twisted just so, and then twisted just so again. Maybe their next thing is FINITE instead of INFINITE.
I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a delusion of grandeur that makes me think being a writer is what makes me any of this, but…
I somehow think that the same thing that makes me imagine a new future, a new path, a new idea is all connected to this writing business and that, perhaps, it’s also why I can never quite let any of it go. The thing that writes a new story, a new essay, a new poem, is the same thing that makes new worlds, over and over again around me, pretty much—and much to my husband’s consternation—at the drop of a hat. And as much as it irritates me that I can’t get a handle on this moody feeling of being compelled toward something, anything I also find it to be rather glowy and important, in the grand scene of things. And somehow, much like the moth, I can’t leave any of it alone.
I think I’m supposed to have GRAND DESIGNS, Erin, even if the whole process leaves me rather confused and turned around.
And if all that’s true, then does it much matter whether my ideas are delusions of grandeur or fields of dreams? (My husband would answer, yes, and to be fair, he has a point.) But maybe my point for now is just to make it so, this thing that I am trying to do right now. To build whatever it is, so they all can come. To do, ahem, the next right thing and muddle through that muddled middle, over and over again.
It is hard work to keep going in the world of the imaginary, Erin. Especially since there aren’t fuzzy sheep to cinematically film as they bound through the grass. But someone has to do it, and it turns out, that might be us. Thank heavens. Who would want only ONE next best thing.
Jamie
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who feels this way…