Kurt Vonnegut and the shape of a story

I am doing the internet equivalent of the old-fashioned writer's  dawdle of sharpening pencils.  I am finding writerish things via Google and YouTube. Because both of these videos made me laugh out loud and think that pencil-sharpening time is about over, here they are.  Kurt Vonnegut, whom we can also thank for this:
1. "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's "good uncle" Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country. Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut's most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.


Too many days spent too tightly ensnared in our own company or even more alarmingly, our own thoughts, may drive us to distraction.  I am trying to get back on track.  Being reminded that others are out there in one-man gliders, hoping to catch the necessary thermals and ridge lifts to carry them a safe and predictable distance helps.

Brain plasticity - learning new tricks

Photograph from Hans van der Boom

I dream of Willy Wonka's Fizzy Lifting Drink while making my ponderous, gravity-captured way, feeling as though I'm wearing lead boots from an old diving suit. With the belt weights, a fast trip to the bottom.  Not all the time, not even most of it.  Often enough to know the difference between soaring and sinking.

In the movement, which I have to stop thinking of as New Age and assign a different name, perhaps consciousness, much is made about being in, of and about light.  All, they say, is about energy, about vibration, about ascending from what is old and dense into higher realms. Being stuck in fear, worry, resentment and lack feels like being tied to an anchor.  Love, trust, humor and optimism throw open the doors and windows and make room for more options.  There are specific steps one can take, not just wishing ourselves light as jellyfish, bright as glow-sticks.

This morning while searching for material on brain plasticity not yet found, I came upon a TED talk by Shawn Achor who offered a 21-day program to greater happiness by getting out of our brain ruts, creating new neuropathways (if that is the correct word.)  He suggested, for 21 days, writing down three NEW gratitudes each day, journaling about one positive experience each day, moving one's body in some form of exercise, practicing a form of meditation that removes us from the dreaded and counter-productive multi-tasking (ugh, much-loathed phrase) and focuses us on one thing in the moment, and practicing what he calls Random Acts of Kindness, an example of which is to send, first thing each day, an encouraging or complimentary email to someone.  I think snail mail would count, too.

All of this is in aid of  finally, maybe permanently, unlacing our lead boots, lifting away from the sense of discouraged plodding that can overtake us.  We are more than capable of existing as beings of light, sources of hope and affirmation for each other and ourselves.   We can learn to use our brains differently, to take action that improves our quality of life.  In a podcast yesterday, I heard a speaker, Judith Dack, tell how making small, slow, focused changes in how we move our bodies,  varying our patterns, can produce extraordinary results.  Her talk is available through midnight on Wednesday, Aug. 1, here.  Scroll down to the replay.  Her information gave me hope.

I know as well as I know anything that we are not intended to drag, mope and grouse through our days.  One of the TED talks I heard this morning referred to the very small portion of individual happiness that is affected by externals, compared with the powerful internal influence we have over our moods and even destinies.  Experiments worth trying.  What is there to lose? 

Adjustments and revisions

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. ~Faith Baldwin

The ability to change our minds has to be one of the great gifts of being assigned life in human form. There is no rule or requirement that we continue to be who we were yesterday. If we can't change our spots, we can alter the way in which we judge them.

Revisions, adjustments, reconsiderations and about-faces are not signs of uncertainty but of awareness. I know discomfort is quantifiable and our wish to escape it, universal. Nothing else works quite as well as doing something - or everything - differently.

Think of these words as a kiss on the forehead, a blessing to go forward with a growing suspicion that not all of this is engraved on non-returnable marble. We are allowed, without being fined for littering, to leave ill-fitting notions, opinions, by the side of the road. Many of them will reappear to haunt and hector when we are vulnerable, but their visits will grown less frequent, their forms less substantial.

It may be foolishness taken to the extreme, but I have grown to believe that life, and our untidy, idiosyncratic ways of living it, are not meant to be sources of chronic disappointment. Whether we find happiness because of or in spite of our circumstances, a measure of peace and optimism is the goal.

Regardless of what you've heard or where you heard it, there is no such thing as too old to change. A feeble excuse at best, I can no longer even sell it to myself.