Can it be done and Can I do it.........

Mother Teresa wrote, "Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are endless." I read this today and the words stopped me dead in my tracks. If kind words echo endlessly than what do angry words do?

In every aspect of life there are two questions that must always be answered according to Annie Dillard: "Can it be done?" and "Can I do it?" These are the questions that have plagued my life. Anything that involves doing something for someone else I am absolutely confident to the point of arrogance that it can be done and I can do it. Anything that involves me alone I run and wallow in self-doubt until I have no choice but to ask for help and to reach out if I am ever going to change the pattern of my writing life.

I have a friend in Africa who has been reading and talking to me about my blog and she mentioned today that I need an array of emotion just not fear-based emotion. I agreed with her I had been thinking along the same lines, but thinking and doing are two completely different things. For so long all I have had is failure and fear of failure. What does it mean to write joy and happiness and laughter? What do those emotions and actions feel like?

In all of my entries up until today I was writing what I know. I was comfortable inside the box in my little world, in my little apartment, in my little life that occasionally I come out of to play with a friend, a lover or even my family. I always go back though to inside the box afraid to stay out in the world for too long.

The opposite of fear is faith. The opposite of sorrow is joy. The opposite of anger is gratitude. The opposite of selfishness is giving without expectation. The opposite of crying is laughter. The opposite of being somber is simply smiling with kindness. The opposite of sad is happy.

All of these opposites live within me, but what I am noticing is some have more of a life than others. Graham Greene said that a manuscript "takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he is at the beginning . . . as though [the manuscript] were something he had begun in childhood and was finishing now in old age." And here I sit not the same person I was on January 9th the date of the first entry of this blog, yet still the same in so many ways.

How long does change take to happen? How long does it take a mind, a heart to give a greater opportunity for living to the lighter positive opposites? How does that psychic change occur? To go back to the beginning I must ask myself "Can it be done?" and "Can I do it?"

The answer to those questions lie in what feelings I am willing to bring to the laptop that are uncomfortable. What am I willing to let go of that I wrap around me like a pall? Am I willing to learn how to expect things will work out? Am I willing to accept with grace when they don't? Am I willing to believe that even I deserve to be happy? Am I willing to feel all those feeling that I have been too afraid to feel?

What would happen if I actually let go and laughed? What voice would boom from the sky and tell me "laughter is not for you." What would happen if just for an hour I stopped thinking how I should be and I just was? What in that hour would I find to write about?

I have talked for days and weeks about writing of an experience and attaching a feeling to it, but there are only a few feelings I recognizably have when I am alone. If I had to answer if I was happy alone I wouldn’t have an answer. If I had to answer if I had felt joy alone I wouldn’t have answer. Have I ever laughed alone? Do I smile when no one else can see me?

All of these questions I can’t answer, but when I am with someone really with someone in such a way I don’t think of how I should be I do have an answer. The answer is yes I feel happy, I know what joy feels like, I laugh and I can feel myself smile.

Can I write the feelings of a positive experience or is all I have in me the negative to write. I woke up to these thoughts from out of Africa and I have been haunted all day by self-doubt and fear that the negative feelings are all I have to write about.

I am a visual learner who needs to have an action in order to change the way my mind thinks and works. I am a believer in flash cards with inspirational saying, meditation books that repeat the same message every day with a different set of words. I am a believer in writing exercises and getting lost and trying to find your way back home.

If I extend my commitment to write daily into exercises of writing the opposites then I need to recall an experience I can write daily to attach my opposite feelings to. A blogging exercise of little vignettes something I truly can enjoy.

Exercise #1:

It was his hands that won her heart in the beginning. His hands were not the imagined thick strong type you would think belonged to a full-fledged communist. His hands were clean and pale; the kind of hands that looked like they had come out of warm water. His hands suited him perfectly.

It was her first meeting. She dressed looking at herself in the mirror thinking there was nothing new about her to see. Her blue-green eyes were still blue-green; her pale skin was still pale; her thin lips still thin and her blonde scraggly hair still blonde and scraggly. She refocused on applying her lipstick and let her mind wonder why she was making all the extra effort to look perfectly desirable.

She was going to a meeting of the minds, where ideas and philosophies would be noticed over the average good looks of a want-to-be so she can belong communist. But since he first spoke to her at the cafeteria she had felt a desire to try harder, push a bit farther, she found a willingness within her to take the next step forward. Tonight at the meeting he would be there sitting off to the side up front in the first chair of vertical rows in a hall crammed with people standing horizontally.

Tonight she would sit closer to him. Maybe just five rows back or maybe three. No tonight she was going to sit next to him. She had planned the evening over and over in her mind. There he would be when she walked in the hall. He would feel her presence long before he saw her. He would change the direction of his walk circling back not knowing why, but just knowing he had to. Then when she couldn’t bear to watch him unknowingly search for her any longer she would step up beside him. They would smile at each other, but she would look away first. She would blush, be embarrassed by her attraction and she would be unable to lift her chin up to look at him he was so attractive to her.

He would speak to her softly, putting his arm around her waist gently guiding her forward to a seat beside him in his vertical row. She would look at the horizontal world standing around them and she would feel his passions and his convictions. She would believe this time it will be different. This time she has found the one.

The lipstick dropped out of her hand and a little gasp brought her back to the mirror and her unchanged reflection. When would it happen? When would she be different? How many meeting in halls filled with smoke and noise and cups of cold coffee? How many counted and folded brochures before she would be different?

He told her the world could change with her help that she would change if she let herself believe and act on what she believed. She recapped her lipstick, brushed her hair one last time, checked her pantyhose for runs and walked out of her tiny flat throwing her coat over her arm. Tonight would change her. She promised herself she wouldn’t come back to these four walls feeling like she was still waiting for something to happen to her. It had to be tonight. She just couldn’t come back.