Raam Dev

Hello, future.

Breathe Life Into This Moment

It doesn't matter how much you love what has passed. It doesn't matter how perfect this moment is or how much you want to hold on to it. It's gone. Everything that has been, is gone. Everything that will be, is gone. All that remains, for an impossibly brief and ever-fleeting moment, is now, empty, pure, full of potential, a pile of dry kindling awaiting a spark of inspiration.

There is no permanence in anything but change, but change, like fire, must be fed with the breath of life.

So accept each and every moment as a golden opportunity, a moment that you've been given, a chance to do anything you want, or, if you so choose, a chance to sit idly by, daydreaming about what has been or what could be, losing yourself, and that moment, in exchange for absolutely nothing, a dull lifeless stare at a dull, cold, and lifeless pile of kindling, sacrificing precious moment after precious moment, never to see them again, until one day you arrive at the end and look back, upon this frozen and unchangeable wasteland of unused potential, missed, neglected, lost.

So open your heart and open your mind. Breathe life into this moment. The future awaits your hand in its creation, right here, right now.

Look not backward with nostalgic sadness into the frozen sea of changelessness, but forward with blissful gratitude into the warm arms of unwritten possibility.

Reading Distractions: Questions

Writing creates an adventure, a series of thoughts and images that lead the reader, carrying them on a series of emotional peaks and troughs through an ocean of time, moving them from one point to another and, hopefully, adding something of value or making the adventure fun along the way.

As a writer, it's important to think about what your reader will experience on that journey. It's important to think about the various elements of language and how they combine to create that experience, that adventure that your reader embarks on when they commit to reading something you've written. (You're on a mini adventure right now.)

Adventures that are uncomfortable and full of unwanted distractions are not much fun. If anything, they're hard work. You want your adventures to be enjoyable, easy, and free from distractions.

Distractions come in all forms, the most obvious of which are bad grammar, bad spelling, badly assembled sentences, hard to follow paragraphs, and the usage of words that are needlessly complicated. But there are much less obvious distractions that can subtly influence the adventure and distract the reader from the experience.

Let me give you a real-world example.

A friend shared an article with me called 7 Habits of Highly Prolific Writers. The article starts with a short introduction and then lists the seven habits with little descriptions underneath each one:

Questions can be a source of unwanted distraction

Notice the question at the end of that first point? That question is a dangerous distraction.

When I began reading this list, that one question — "What’s yours?"  —  made me stop and think.

I began to wonder, what is my creative time? What are my daily routines? When do I usually do my creative work? Suddenly I wasn't interested in reading point number two because I'd already been distracted by a question in point number one. The momentum was lost and the adventure ended prematurely.

When I tried to ignore that lost momentum and continue reading anyway, I found that only a fraction of my attention was available; I was still thinking about that question in the back of my head.

In all forms of communication questions are powerful things. They invite the listener to stop listening to you, to stop being receptive to what you're saying and listen instead to themselves.

Of course not all questions are created equal: there are many questions in this essay but none of them are asking you to stop and think deeply, or to recall memories or think about your daily routines or even access the vast stores of knowledge buried inside your brain.

In writing, there's a time and place for questions and it's important to anticipate what effect your question will have on the readers' experience of that writing. Sometimes you want the reader to stop and consider something before continuing on and at other times you want the reader to have an easy and comfortable route to go from one point to the next.

Questions at the end of an essay or article can invite the reader to continue exploring on their own, to extend the conversation using their own unique treasure-trove of memories and experiences, trail-blazing and sharing a unique adventure beyond and outside your own writing.

What other distractions have you noticed while reading?

Standing Alone in the Darkness

Creativity feels good, being free to brainstorm and think and try and test and then scrap it all if it doesn't work and start over from scratch, all of that sounds fantastic when looked at from a distance, no matter how small that distance may be. But the truth is that living as a creative, working to embrace creativity wholly and completely on a regular basis, in between these dryly dull rituals of endless and inescapable routines, to exist as a creative soul and create things with creative energy, that's like wrestling a thousand-pound gorilla inside a thick, dense rainforest, in the middle of the night. It's like facing a crocodile in a swamp where you have no footing, and then standing there in the pitch black with no knowledge of where you are or what's lurking nearby.

Once in awhile you feel something in that darkness, you grab onto it, and for that one endlessly brief moment in time things feel a bit better, you feel a bit more in control, the stuff you're trying to do seems to happen a little easier and then you find yourself suddenly doing it and you start to tell yourself that YES, you can do this, you can work with this, you are a powerful and unstoppable force of nature because now you've found it, that hold, that little thing that seems to make all the impossibility of what it took to get there seem insignificant and unimportant and you forget, very quickly, how much effort it took to arrive at where you are, how much unknown you had to face, how much self-conscious ridicule and self-doubt you had to let go of, how much fear you had to put aside to find that little thing you're now clinging onto, that preciously delicate but incredibly potent little flow you're tapping into, hoping, wishing that it will never stop running, that it will never go away, that you'll never lose it again. But you know that's an unreasonable request from the universe. You know that soon your fantastic grip on this creative world you cherish so dearly will be gone, and you will once again return to being that tortured, naked soul, standing in the dark with so many unknowns all around, so many thousand-pound gorillas ready to wrestle and so many prehistoric crocodiles in these waters, and now you're right here, facing them all over again, looking, searching, waiting for that one thing, that one thread of connection, prepared to embrace that flow at a moments notice, ready to begin, alert, aware, patiently understanding that this wonderful thing called creativity is a gift worth waiting for, a gift worth giving up comfort to stand there, all alone in the dark.

On the Importance of Daily Practice – A Passage from my Free-Writing Journal

I have a folder called 'Free-Writing' that I created almost a year ago with the intention of developing a daily free-writing habit (a technique where you attempt to write non-stop until you reach a certain number of words, writing about whatever comes to your head; it's a form of thought-streaming). The folder currently contains about 17,000 words of writing, but that only represents 32 days in the past 10 months that I've actually sat down to write something in there.

Suffice to say, I haven't formed a daily free-writing habit.

I was adding to the folder again today, jotting down a few thoughts I've had recently on how the lack of silence and solitude in our lives is likely having a negative impact on our personal development, when I became curious about what I had written as my first entry in this free-writing folder (the writing distractions never end). I'm including that first entry below. Ironically enough, I'm writing this entry from the same Starbucks mentioned in the entry below.

I'm sharing this free-writing passage with you because I'd like to hear what you think about me sharing more stuff like this. From my perspective, this free-writing often borders on gibberish-- it's usually just me emptying my head and remarking on things while I go off on different tangents. But it feels wrong to assume what you would think about it.

I've learned that what seems obvious and worthless to us can often be valuable and insight for others. Maybe my gibberish is your gold.

If you find something valuable in the entry below, please let me know and I will start sharing more bits from my free-writing. Perhaps sharing my free-writing will even help with developing a daily free-writing habit.

2012-01-12 13:00:00

It's snowing outside and I'm here sitting in Starbucks drinking a large latte as it snows outside. Every glance out the window I'm reminded how alien and different the world seems, so white, wet, cold, beautiful. It's as if something is erasing the landscape, slathering on a fresh coat of paint.

Perhaps I'm staring a little too much, waiting for something to happen, delaying my writing, using the snow as an excuse not to write. How silly that sounds. But is it really so silly? How many excuses do we come up with on an almost daily basis? Excuses not to exercise, not to wake up early in the morning, not to start that next project or begin working on that idea that's been bugging us for the past few weeks or months.

There I go, I was doing it again, staring out the window contemplating nothing. That would normally be fine on any other occasion, but this time I'm committed to writing at least 500 words here, thought-streaming even if it means emptying gibberish from my head. That's an interesting thought: emptying gibberish from my head. If that's what is there, then emptying it should be a good thing. It will give the good stuff room to breathe, room to grow.

I have the urge to check how many words I've written so far because I want to stop. I feel the pressure to "do something productive" and that's pulling me away from this thing I've committed to. I really should commit to doing this more often, to taking my thoughts and simply emptying them to words, pouring them out through my fingers.

I have no doubt that regular emptying of my thoughts will result in a better flow for the thoughts I want to share with others. Anything worth doing requires practice to perfect. If I want to get better at expressing and sharing my thoughts, then I need to practice expressing and sharing my thoughts.

If I want to improve my ability to express and share my thoughts, then the mechanism of turning thoughts into words needs to be practiced. I need to get used to turning thought into word, into taking ideas and concepts in their thought-form and shaping them into ideas and concepts in word-form.

It's almost silly to think that one's ability to express ideas and concepts in word form will somehow magically improve over time, that simply having the desire to improve will make us improve.

Practice will help us improve, not the passage of time. We need to be practicing the art of expressing thoughts and concepts if we wish to improve that skill.

If I want to improve my writing, I need to write. Regularly. Daily if possible. (Of course it's possible.)

If I want to improve my speaking, I need to speak. Regularly. I need to practice conveying concepts by speech, of turning ideas and messages in their thought-form and converting them to ideas and messages in their speech form.

If I want to improve my physical body, the ability for it to stretch and grow and function properly, then I need to exercise my body daily. I need to stretch daily. Simply doing it once in awhile isn't enough. It needs to be regular practice.

Without regular practice, how can we expect to improve? The absence of regular practice creates a plateau where progress stalls. To ensure forward-movement, we must create a habit of regular practice.