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On Morning and Evening Routines

I have this routine I do in the morning now. I wake up, and after bumbling around in a bit of a fog, I settle down and I stretch my neck. (Specifically, for all you bodywork types, I stretch my scalenes, which are the ropelike muscles on the side of the poor apparatus that has the burden of holding your thick, heavy skull up.) Then I meditate for a few moments (often doing my cheat-y meditations) and then do a bit of cheat-y yoga, too. And then I make a cup of something caffeinated and then settle down to write, whether it’s on my personal creative work or my job assignments.

The writing is the work, of course, but leading up to it is important. The routine is what launches me into the writing; it’s like a nice little platform or foundation for the day. Interestingly enough, the most important part of the routine are the neck stretches, not the meditation or the caffeine. (Those things are definitely nice, though!) I can truncate or skip the beverage or the Yoda mindfulness stuff, but if I skip the neck stretches, all hell breaks loose in terms of my day’s output. It’s a weird, pedestrian yet quasi-mystical thing, this morning routine.

It sounds very high-minded when I write it down, but honestly it is actually super-practical: the stretches and yoga are to counteract the beginnings of carpal tunnel I began experiencing late last year. (A lot of hand/wrist pain is related to very tight scalenes and sunken chest muscles, apparently.) A massage therapist I went to suggested to stretch out my super-tight neck muscles morning and evening — and yes, it makes a difference for my particular body. I started doing the neck stuff, and then just plastered on other things that felt nice, experimenting with the order, etc. And lo and behold — morning routine! And I didn’t even make a resolution to find one! Score!

But I’ve always had a fascination with people’s routines for the morning and evening. There’s something so personal and intimate about how people begin and wind down their days and evenings to me — something beautifully ordinary and yet very idiosyncratic. I love hearing how people deal with the practicalities of food, eating, caffeine and exercise while still trying to incorporate their creative and intellectual passions into their lives.

There’s something both humbling and inspiring about hearing how legit creative geniuses start their day, and there’s no predicting who does what in the morning. James Joyce apparently would get up at 10 but stay in bed, breakfasting and occasionally talking with his tailor, until 11 or so. Then he would get up, shave and then play the piano before he got down to the business of creating modernist prose. (This makes me feel better when I try to wake early to work on my novel and suddenly instead decide that clearing out my magazine piles and restringing my guitar are a better use of my time.)

Others are intimidatingly productive. Ben Franklin was a famously busy polymath, but found an hour every morning nevertheless to read while naked, a practice he called “air baths.” Le Corbusier started early with 6am gymnastics and painting, while Haruki Murakami gets up at 4am, writes for 5-6 hours, then goes running in the afternoon. Twyla Tharp mentions in her book The Creative Habit that she takes a cab to the gym hella early every morning to work out with a trainer to start her day. The important part of the routine isn’t the workout, it’s the cab, she specifies, which I loved.

Interestingly enough, there isn’t as much info out there on evening routines as there is for mornings — maybe because evenings feel more intimate, I’m not sure. I’m trying to find the evening equivalent of my morning routine, but surprisingly, that’s proved more elusive, and I haven’t quite settled on anything yet. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t quite figured out what the purpose of the nighttime routine is. If morning routines are to create idylls of quiet and focus, or perhaps momentum and energy — depending on who you are and what you need — then what are evenings for? To wind down? Empty your mind? Relax? Set yourself up for the next day? (For me, it should probably involve squelching the impulse to squeeze more out of the day.)

I haven’t figured out what I particularly need from my nighttime routine yet. But it’s cool. Hopefully it’ll happen as organically as the morning routine did. If there’s anything I’ve learned, routines that bookend your day are a unique extension of the person practicing them — and you can’t top-down force uniqueness, of course…it’s an inside-out thing.

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Posted by Kat Asharya in Creativity + Writing on February 4th, 2015 | 2 Comments »

On a Lighter Note

+ People have been onto the animation of Don Hertzfeldt for awhile now but I’ll be totally honest — I actually had never encountered his work until.he did a credits sequence for “The Simpsons” that was probably the most deeply weird 2 minutes of TV I’d ever seen. (I put it up there with the midget dancing scene in “Twin Peaks.”)

Hertzfeldt does deceptively simple-looking hand-drawn animation, coupled with surreal strokes of humor and strange, naked neurotic emotions; his work’s been at Sundance a bazillion times over the years, and he’s got a bit of a cult going on. I had never really seen it — animation is kind of its own thing, and certainly during my film school years it was never quite treated on the same level as, you know, “cinema.”

But I was aimlessly browsing Netflix’s streaming movies one night, though, and finally checked out Hertzfeldt’s feature “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.” I kind of fell in love: his work starts off funny, off-beat and quirky, but as it proceeds and the main character unravels mentally, the story becomes poignant and even tragic. Even though he draws stick figures, Hertzfeldt’s work is so human — so much about the frailty of human existence, and how unhappy we can be. In the end, not a light, fun breezy story, but a deeply resonant, sad one.

+ We went to see “Inherent Vice” the other night and while it’s not the most cohesive work, or even P.T. Anderson’s best film — I think for sentimental reasons I will always love “Magnolia,” though I have to see if it holds up over the years — I still mightily enjoyed it. Sometimes a movie is a well laid-out architecture of story events and ideas, and sometimes it’s just a shaggy dog running from one sprinkler to the next — this film’s a shaggy dog and an oddly loveable one. I really enjoyed Joaquin Phoenix doing a funnier, lighter role, and that second-to-last showdown scene between him and Josh Brolin’s square cop character is kind of worth the whole ride for me. Oh, and any film with Can on the soundtrack = aces!

+ Oh! And I wanted to tell everyone about the best book I read last year, which I should’ve wrote about last year, but I was busy being anxious and emotional. And in truth, I didn’t read it until the end of the year, anyway.

But! Now I’m telling everyone I know: Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings is a deeply genius read. Not an easy one, by any means — just to give you a sense, James has cited Faulkner as an influence on this book, and the multiple narrators and many layers of history and politics make it a dense, sometimes difficult book, which can get a little tangled, too, in the Jamaican patois James uses for some of the characters.

It starts off detailing the patchwork of circumstances and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley — still a very shadowy incident in Jamaican history — but then leaps off into cocaine-era NYC. But after awhile, you find your groove and it’s so worth the ride. I put down the book feeling hopeful, devastated, as if I’d time-traveled into the past and had an eagle-eye view to connect the butterfly effect of one historical almost-event with the sociopolitics of a seemingly unconnected time. Read it!

Anyway, I went on a big James kick after finishing Seven Killings and read his previous book, The Book of Night Women, a historical novel about a female slave on a sugar plantation in 19th century Jamaican. That might be a better place to start if you want to read James: the story is more compressed and linear, though again, it’s mostly written in patois — which you quickly get the hang of, really, but it takes a bit of time. But it’s also a brilliant book: brutal in its unflinching portrayal of slaver’s physical and emotional violence, yet beautifully rich and unexpectedly tender in its characterizations. Seriously: Best. Writer. Ever. Seriously!

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Posted by Kat Asharya in Art + Culture on January 27th, 2015 | No Comments »

Gifts From a Year

I’m going about this New Year’s business all wrong, I know — aren’t I supposed to leave 2014 in the dust and head boldly into 2015? I guess it’s taken until the end of the holidays to give me enough clarity and calm to see the lessons of 2014.

The thing about insights is that they always seem to carry over into the next year or two, or even three — it’s a little like going deeper and deeper into the ocean, one strata of pressure at a time. (I’d love to read a book analyzing the life cycle of insights, actually — does anyone have any suggestions?) So perhaps it’s okay to reckon a little later with what a year has taught me, now that the dust has cleared and I can see a little more clearly.

I think last year was the first where I realized just what an anxious little human I can be. I’m not talking clinical anxiety, but the garden everyday mental static that can really pull and tug at your peace of mind. Last year I felt such a lot of it — over so many seemingly out-of-control areas of my life that interlocked with one another — and for the first time I felt sometimes I just couldn’t deal because I was so overwhelmed.

The crazy thing was that so many of the changes and circumstances were so positive — love, family, creative opportunities — but there was just so much unexpected stuff alongside it all that it made me worry and fret to the point of not enjoying anything.

I forgot where I read this, but I remember reading somewhere that physiologically speaking, from the body’s perspective, anxiety and excitement resemble each other so much that they are almost identical biological responses — there’s the elevated heartbeat, the shortness of breath, a tightening in the chest. The biggest difference is the mental story we lay over it. Excitement is a kind of burst of wild anticipation of joy, opportunity and happiness; anxiety is an anticipation of failure, calamity, catastrophe. One response is joy-based, but the other arises from fear.

When I read this, something inside me clicked: a lot of my anxiety was fear of fucking everything up. I was facing a lot of wonderful life changes but I was practicing for failure already in my imagination; I had no faith in the resilience and endurance of happiness.

I had learned this fear early on; I’ve written in my newsletter about growing up with an anxious parent, and I had, despite many of my best efforts, internalized this tendency as well. In a way, this humbled me. I think many of us fear becoming our parents on some level, but if the New Age adage of “what you resists, persists,” then here was my comeuppance to the arrogance to think I could escape my familial legacy. It gave me a sense of compassion, though — for myself and for my parents, because it’s not easy to escape anxiety. And for myself, because on some level, it made me feel better. Of course I’d be so anxious in the face of such dramatic emotional, financial and creative tidal changes happening all at once! Those are the instincts I inherited, the quickest tools to draw upon when faced with the nervous tiger that is anxiety.

Anxiety, too, reflects a strange, almost dysmorphic relationship to time. By projecting your past fears into a future of failure and disaster, you’re psychologically existing in two temporal dimensions at the same time…past and future, duh! Your poor brain is taking input from one and putting it into the other. Of course, what gets squeezed out of the equation? The present moment, which is where gurus, psychologists and all sorts of wise types say is the only real time we truly possess.

Ironically enough, getting back to the present moment during an anxiety attack is one of the few ways I’ve found to stave it off. Luckily, my other familial legacy is Buddhism, and meditation does help, even the cheat-y kinds of meditations I do. Yoga helps, as does doing anything physically challenging. A beautiful walk, a heartfelt conversation, making art, riding horses or otherwise spending time with creatures with a gift for being in the moment — they help to keep your attention in the here and now. Which helps, honestly.

I also think mental states like anxiety can be triggered or exacerbated by hunger, thirst and being tired, so sometimes I have to be hypervigilant about making sure I’m not hungry, thirsty or sleepy. Sometimes I just tell myself I need to make it through the day, the hour, the minute — not every action I take has to have its long-term effects accounted for before I take it. Sometimes it is okay, and human, and real, to be fragile and vulnerable and to not have the answers or all the ducks lined up in a row. We all do our best, and hope that’s enough.

+++++

The nice thing about the past few weeks is that life has gotten very quiet, and it’s been perfect — everything is a lot calmer and I feel so much less mental and emotional static with more “white space” in my schedule and mind. I don’t doubt that the nervous tiger will be back — I don’t think there is any cure, and to hope for one is almost like inviting anxiety to have a permanent seat at the dinner table — but it is nice to hit it at the ebb point. Hope everyone’s New Year is proceeding beautifully!

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Posted by Kat Asharya in Soul + Wisdom on January 20th, 2015 | No Comments »

Years That Ask Questions and Years That Answer

Ah, yes, a happy new year — a fresh beginning, a set of resolutions, a word-of-the-year, a reset/renew, a detox, a turning of the page. Only, for me, not this round.

Don’t get me wrong: I still did my little hippie productivity yearly planner, I still set up my little time-keeping/scheduling system, I have goals and desires and things I’d like to accomplish. But in 2015, I’m cutting myself some slack.

Not that I’m pooh-poohing anyone who’s embarking on a type-A super-planning kind of thing in terms of setting up their new year. There are some years that call for that — years where time is malleable, putty in your hands, able to be molded and filled with whatever your endeavor. Where intention and action align with ease, and everything on your to-do list seems to expand and move you to growth.

I think of these as kind of “Athenian” years — you know, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, the great war strategist and city-builder and patroness of craftspeople, the great grey-eyed lady of discernment and skilled action. These are years that weave threads into fabric, fabric into useful shapes and garments — years that build, solidify, consolidate.

But then there are other kinds of years. To keep with the Greek goddess groove (bear with me here, I’m feeling Jungian!), perhaps you could call some years “Persephone” years — years of walking in shadow, treading the underworld, confronting fears, anxieties, sadness and unresolved wounds and griefs.

(Of course, you can expand this whole metaphor towards the entire mythological pantheon — I’ve definitely had my Artemisian years of trawling the psychological wilderness in a glorious solitude, as well as those super-fun, glamorous Aphrodite years of romance, good times and carousing!)

Looking back at my 2014, though, I realized a lot of my angst was wanting to have an Athenian year so badly, but being immersed in a huge Persephone kind of year. Beyond the actual specifics of the circumstances and events, underneath I was grappling with a sense of disappointment and failure that my intentions were so derailed. I still did a lot of what I wanted, but I also was so overwhelmed with stress, anxiety and fear that I couldn’t savor any accomplishment or experience very much. It kind of sucked. There’s no use knocking off items on your bucket list or to-do list or whatever if the experience of them is so clouded and polluted with negative emotions.

So for 2015, yes, I still have intentions and goals and such, but I’m holding onto them lightly. Already, looking ahead, I can see huge mountains to scale on the path. The big changes set into motion last year are still unfolding, and even bigger ones are coming — ones whose outcomes and tranformations I can’t predict in the least. In the face of such challenges, I think all I can do is be present as possible, be kind and gentle to myself and others around me and have as much fun and joy as I can. I think that’s just the perfect amount of enough to begin my New Year.

Zora Neale Hurston actually has one of my favorite quotes about years, and it’s one that gives the title to this post:

There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.

Whatever year you desire, I hope yours is off to a beautiful start!

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Posted by Kat Asharya in Soul + Wisdom on January 3rd, 2015 | No Comments »

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