Thoughts about my Social Networking Experiment

Tags

blogging, Google, Google Plus, Google Reader, notebooksandteacups, Social Networking, Twitter, writing

Hi everyone.  Long time no talk, or blog, I suppose.  I’m writing today to share what’s been happening with my social networking experiment and life in general.

I love Twitter.  When Google shut its Reader service down, I almost had a nervous breakdown.  It was inconceivable to me that I would have to find some other, infinitely inferior, way to consume my online content, which ranged from news feeds to blogs to all sorts of other websites.  That whole drama forced me to re-think my online life, and that re-thinking coincided with the re-thinking I was doing about my online writing presence and whether or not I should continue making a significant effort for what felt like very minimal reward.  Twitter was new to me, but I quickly took to it because of its ease of use and the ability it gives its users to jump in feet first and get going.  If you engage, it does feel like a conversation, although I haven’t yet delved too deeply into the area of starting actual conversations with strangers.  One step at a time.  All in all, using Twitter has been a wonderful experience.  What I love most about it is that I can tweet about a diverse range of subjects without feeling like I’m going to lose followers because I’m not writing in my “niche” exclusively.  I’m able to be a whole person on Twitter.

I’m not active on Google+ yet because, unlike Twitter, it doesn’t feel like a place where you can dive in and just get started without significant legwork.  I have found Google+ far more difficult to get going with, and while I acknowledge that there is a learning curve there that I have not yet taken the time to crack, the site itself simply doesn’t appeal to me the way Twitter’s interface does.  I have followed a few folks on Google+, but I find it far more difficult to find people there than I do on Twitter, and further, I’m not exactly sure how anyone is going to find me, being an unknown.  Worst of all, I can’t stand the way my “feed” looks.  Perhaps if I had more experience with social networking sites, especially Facebook, the style of feed used on Google+ would appeal to me.  As it stands, I find it bulky and overwhelming.

In terms of my day-to-day life, there have been some significant changes, mainly with respect to my health.  I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease and low thyroid, along with a hefty number of other food allergies and intolerances, all of which have banded together to make my life a living hell of late.  I’m trying to be positive, but I’m a food lover and, taken together with how incredibly sick I became before finally figuring out what was wrong with me, it’s been a difficult few weeks.  Grieving the loss of some of life’s greatest pleasures is hard.  Also, waiting for further test results to find out if I’ve already succumb to something terminal is anxiety-making at best.  I haven’t had time or energy to devote to my writing projects.  I started feeling a bit more energetic yesterday, but I still have a long way to go.

While not blogging did initially give me more time to work on my book, I do sort of miss blogging in what may very well and up being an undercurrent of masochistic tendencies buried deep within my psyche.  There is something nice about getting a longer thought out there than Twitter allows for, and the fact is that I have a lot of things that I would like to say that I haven’t said because fear has been holding me back.  I think that if I do return to posting on my blog with any sort of regularity, that I’m going to be ditching my self-imposed rules, put into place because of the advice I’ve read out there to begin with, and just doing my own thing how I see fit.  I hope that you enjoy this larger scope of subject matter, and that I can transfer what I enjoy about the Twitter experience to my blog.

For those who enjoy summaries, here is a list of the lessons I’ve learned thus far:

1) Twitter is awesome because it has enabled me to combine my content consumption and social networking/sharing, actually saving me time.  Twitter has also allowed me to share information regarding subjects I’m passionate about, something that I have had difficulty with in the blogosphere because of fears surrounding the importance of staying within one’s “niche.”

2) Google+ is not shaping up to be my cup of tea, but my ignorance is likely my greatest obstacle on that score.

3) Gluten-free bread is a crumbly bastard that needs to be toasted and welded together with an inch-high layer of butter or margarine in order to be bitten into and withdrawn from the vicinity of one’s cake-hole intact.

4) I kind of – sort of – miss blogging, but if I decide to return to regular posting, I will need to change my self-imposed rules in order to stop it from becoming another item on my weekly to-do list, a status which quickly makes it lose its appeal.

Until next time, whenever that is…

* * *

Alisa Neves is uncovering her writing life on her blog,
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
. Contact her here, or find her on Twitter, @AlisaNeves.

Social Networking Experiment Underway

Tags

blogging, notebooksandteacups, Social Networking, writing

Blogging for the sake of building a community of individuals who will eventually perhaps be interested in reading my books is not going as planned, so I’ve decided to take a short hiatus from blogging to undertake what I’m calling a “social networking experiment.”

This has all come about because I’m not as convinced as I once was that writers need to blog to build a solid online platform.  There are so many ways to get yourself out there, on the internet anyway, that it seems to me that blogging is but one option among many.  I may be wrong, and if I am I will return and blog with all the passion that my little fingers can fire forth from their ends.  If I’m right, then I will return to let you all know how my experiment went, and what it taught me.

Blogging is time consuming, especially compared to the time commitment required for the same level of engagement on some other sites.  I really enjoy blogging, but the reality is that I’m simply not as good at it as I am at writing books, which is where I need to focus my attention at the moment.

What will this experiment consist of?  Well, I will be spending time on Twitter and possibly on Google+, and if my activity on these sites seems to be well-received by my peers in each network, then I may launch my own website to serve as my internet “home.”  Really, where I “end up” has yet to be determined, because I’m only embarking on this journey in the coming days, or even weeks.

I intend to tweet about my experiment.  You can find me on Twitter @AlisaNeves.  If I can figure out Google+, and that’s your preferred social network, you can find me there too.

* * *

Alisa Neves is uncovering her writing life on her blog,
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
. Contact her here, or find her on Twitter, @AlisaNeves.

Getting Back to Basics: Writing from the Inside Out

Tags

being your best self, blogging, knowing yourself, notebooksandteacups, overwhelmed, quiet, simplicity, Social Networking, writing

I’m sick today, with a cold nasty enough to have kept me home from work.  Through my swollen-headed haze, it’s occurred to me that there is more to achieving one’s goals, or reaching one’s dreams, than the studied and calculated adherence to all the rules and must-dos floating around out there in cyberspace.

Write in the early morning before others in your home awake and before your day gets going and you are too tired to write.

Keep an idea-capturing tool with you at all times so that the fleeting imaginative nuggets that fly past you throughout your day aren’t lost forever when you’re distracted by a stranger asking you for the time on the street.

Use social networking sites THIS, and only THIS, way.

Blog.

Blog in your niche.

Keep blog posts short so that more people will be willing to read them, but don’t be afraid of posting a long post if it’s of extremely high quality (with no quantifier provided to indicate what level of quality would merit a lengthier post).

Don’t do anything to harm the fragile balance of your blog and/or social networking strategies, or all your followers will abandon you, mass exodus style, because you’ve upset the internet gods.

I could go on and on, even more than I already have.

The process of uncovering my writing life is proving to be more complex than I had originally anticipated.  Within this seemingly simple pursuit, challenges have arisen that I could never have foreseen.  The most jarring of which has been trying to make sense of all the advice out there, given freely to writers on the internet (a.k.a. the worst procrastination tool around), by people who claim to know what they’re talking about; some certainly do, and some definitely don’t.  Worse yet than taking that advice, of actually mentally processing it to try to figure out what I should be obeying or ignoring, is forsaking my own common sense and what I’ve personally learned through trial and error, instead assuming that someone else knows more than I do about me.

I have been infected by the decluttering bug for years now, and my spaces are comparably minimalistic today to what they were five years ago, but the more deeply I try to dive into myself, the more apparent it becomes that I still have a lot of purging and cleansing to do.  I don’t necessarily mean that I need to halve my belongings at this point, although when you become a simple living advocate you always see room for improvement in this area, but rather that many of the other aspects of living a whole, centered, and balanced life are out of kilter for me.  My eating habits are sometimes stellar, and sometimes pitiful.  My exercise habits have been forgotten lately.  I barely sleep.  My spiritual life is too quiet to even perceive.

Were I not consciously and intentionally examining what habits and outside forces get in the way of my feeling healthy and energetic enough to attack my writing projects with the zeal needed to complete them, these subjects would not feel so immediate or urgent.  The fact that I have allowed myself to succumb to yet another cold is proof positive that I haven’t paid enough attention to self-care lately.  How I honestly believe that I can expect my body and mind to perform a certain way when I’m not behaving in a way that fuels and regenerates them is psychotic.

So, I’m starting today with the belief that I need to be the best person that I can be, and the healthiest person that I can be, before tackling the tiny minutiae that I’m at the point of realizing don’t really matter in the big picture anyway.  With all the conflicting writing advice out there, I think we writers would be much better advised to take a step back, look inwards, be our best selves doing our best work, and erase as much of the chatter as we can from our thought-stream.  For me, becoming overly informed about how to become a successful writer has clawed me back about twenty steps along my path.  It’s time for quiet reflection.  It’s time for information to exit instead of enter my psyche.  It’s time to write.

* * *

Alisa Neves is uncovering her writing life on her blog,
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
. Contact her here, or find her on Twitter, @AlisaNeves.

Goodbye Google Reader

Tags

blogging, content consumption, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, notebooksandteacups, RSS, RSS feed reader, Social Networking, Twitter, writing tools

I debated whether or not to write this post.  I try not to write about what I believe to be trendy subjects.  As much as it would be nice to be relevant in a given moment, I prefer to write posts that will be as meaningful to someone in a few months as they would be today.  I’m making an exception in this case because of how disgusted I am with Google at the moment.

I was one of the many devout Google Reader users who was hooped when Google announced that they were removing their RSS feed reader from their suite of services.  I’m going to seriously downplay my reaction by saying that I was just a tad annoyed by this announcement.  What the hell is wrong with them?  Why remove a service that people are using, that people love, and that tops all its competitors by a mile when it comes to how awesome it is?  It simply defied logic, and I wanted to punch someone at Google in the face; preferably the person that made this decision, but I wasn’t feeling too picky about my blow’s recipient at that moment.

Because none of the other web-based RSS feed reader options out there appealed to me, I decided to join Twitter and am enjoying my stay, as long as I don’t allow myself to begin to wander there without a time limit.  I followed a great number of websites on my feed reader, so my Twitter feed doesn’t even remotely replicate the blogs I followed on Google Reader, but I’m sufficiently informed about subjects that interest me, and I will shape my feed to look how I want it to look over time.

Don’t get me wrong: as nice as Twitter is treating me thus far, there is no replacement for Google Reader in my content consumption life.  I’m back to using my WordPress feed to follow most of my favourite fellow bloggers’ blogs, except for a couple which I need to physically visit because their sites won’t allow me to “follow” them without emailing me posts.  (I don’t “do” email subscriptions.)  I’m flailing a little here, but I’m hoping that some time will help me to smooth out the edges of this new online life I’ve been forced to accept and will find me in a place of quiet contentment in the not too distant future.

Regardless of my resignation to this new reality, I can’t help but feel betrayed by Google.  I was an early Gmail adopter, and have always believed the bull spewed by the company that Google was different, that they almost sort of gave a crap about their customers.  (I say “customers” because Google does make money from our patronage, and besides, I would have been willing to pay a small fee for the continued use of Google Reader.)  Well, my eyes have been opened.  If they can arbitrarily decide to slice Reader from their offerings, who is to say what else could go?  Gmail itself?  I am currently so dependent on my Gmail accounts, that I’m quite certain I would have a stroke if Google announced that they were nixing Gmail, too.  It makes me feel uneasy, and has me scanning the horizon for a different email provider.  Maybe depending on corporations for our most intimate internet needs (which for me is my email accounts) is foolish anyway.  Perhaps we’d be better advised to self-host?  I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I intend to continue my search for it.

So, goodbye Google Reader.  I’ve cleaned you out, shut you down, and cursed your name forever.  I don’t know what in the hell the fools who killed you off were thinking, but you will be sorely missed.

* * *

Alisa Neves is uncovering her writing life on her blog,
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
. Contact her here, or find her on Twitter, @AlisaNeves.

Publishing is lawless, but some things never change

Tags

notebooksandteacups, publishing, publishing industry, self-publishing, writing

I’m in the process of shifting how I think about getting published.  We’ve left the age of gatekeepers.  Everything is wide open, and more now than ever, writers can shape their own destinies, if they’re willing to do the work.  That hasn’t changed.  There may be the odd jackass who (poorly) writes a one-hit wonder and makes a ton of cash, but these instances are rare.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but big publishing house editors or no big publishing house editors, we writers still have to get our hands dirty (with ink, that is, or at least with some dust from our computer keyboards), we still have to feel next to crushed under the weight of our research and words before we can overcome what we’ve learned (especially when we write about painful subject matter) and shape that newly discovered knowledge into a package that can be shared with the world in the hopes that it will make others feel something too.  It’s every bit the agonizing process that it’s ever been.  The only difference, in my opinion, between our old world and this new one, is that after all the toiling and bleeding through our pores, when our new book baby is ready to be shared, we are no longer reliant on the keepers of the publication keys.  We can take that work upon ourselves, do one whole hell of a lot more work, and get those ideas out there for any and all to see.

Now, I don’t want to undermine the importance of traditional publishing.  I do believe that they’ve served as a gatekeeper of quality until recently.  However,  when I read stuff like this, I realize that like every other business out there, the publishing industry is a business that is looking to survive in this changing idea-consumption world that we find ourselves in, and that while a quality standard might still be in place, that standard is not the only thing that writers must aspire to reach in order to be welcomed into the fold of other writers in a given house.  The reality is that a writer’s work must not only be of a high quality, but must further be in a subject or genre which is saleable and which will generate profit.  Again, I don’t begrudge the publishing industry’s will to survive, not one little bit.  What I do find abhorrent is that there are thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of ideas out there that we’re not able to consume and consider at our local bookstore and library.  To me, when books are no longer society’s storehouses of ideas and information and wisdom, then there’s a serious problem.

That’s what I think today.  What do you think?

* * *

A.N. blogs at
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
about writing, blogging, and the rewards and challenges of carving out time from an already busy life to sustain her writing life. Contact her here.

Effecting Change, One Small Action at a Time

Tags

activism, animal rights, conscious living, consumerism, critical thinking, environmentalism, feminism, If a Tree Falls, Law of Attraction, living your truth, making a difference, notebooksandteacups, personal politics, protesting, simplicity, The Secret, vegan

Before I delve into the main subject matter of this post, please be advised that I am writing this from a western perspective, and that my message is geared towards an audience that is living in a war-free area, without totalitarian political leaderships or governments in place.  None of what I am saying has been written to criticise people who are protesting and fighting their governments for their very survival.  Please take this post as it is intended, and know that if you are fighting for what I believe are basic human rights, that my thoughts and prayers are with you.

I’m not sure whether or not I believe in the Law of Attraction.  This theory has become well-known in the western world because of the book The Secret, and also because New Age principles are no longer as hidden from the mainstream as they once were.  We are becoming more open-minded, in general, as a culture, and this is a good thing.  If it weren’t for this increasingly open collective mind, many of the principles that I hold dear would still be lurking in the shadows, rather than being more widely accepted by the masses in recent years as they have been.

One thing that I have noticed, and I can’t help but associate it with the Law of Attraction because my observation is so obviously tied to what I perceive as being this Universal Law in action, is that when individuals want to effect change in the world around them, the most successful among them approach their goals in a positive way, rather than by arguing and trying to exert their influence over that which they do not control.  To be clear, I mean no disrespect to the protestors and activists among us.  Heck, I consider myself a part of this group of subversives, and have proudly worn both labels in the past.  What I am implying is that perhaps there is more to social activism than unrest and that demonstrating one’s values via the way in which one lives may actually hold more potency in terms of effecting change than yelling at others to stop what they’re doing and see things your way.  They won’t.

The purveyors of our worst social, ecological, and economic ills are making money seeing things their own way.  They’re not interested in how you or I see things.  To them, we are nameless, faceless consumers who are there to buy their products and be manipulated into thinking that what they’re peddling is essential to our survival so that we’ll buy more.  Instead of yelling at these scumbags from the streets outside their office towers, holding signs and garnering their ridicule, would it not be wiser, and more effective, to hit them where they’ll feel it: their pocketbooks?  We could all save ourselves considerable time and money if we simply stopped participating in cycles and structures that are out of line with our values.  (I recognize that anyone who is taking the time to protest is also likely practising consumer activism.  Isn’t it time that the rest of the world, be they willing to protest or not, practise a little consumer activism themselves?  It isn’t that difficult to not buy something.  I promise.)

I’ve done the protesting thing.  I’ve marched and made noise.  I feel very fortunate to have never met police officers while undertaking these activities because peaceful protestors are treated worse than murderers and sexual offenders by the police.  Don’t believe me?  Watch If a Tree Falls and then come back to voice your arguments.  (Watch the movie if you can.  The trailer on the site barely touches upon the horrors perpetrated by police against some peaceful protestors.  If you do watch the movie, or have seen it, let’s talk about it in the comments section below.)

Beyond larger scale activism, there’s also the action that we take in our daily lives, not only through the decisions we make about what to purchase, but also what activities to engage in, what to eat, wear, and entertain ourselves with.  Everything we do sets an example to those around us.  Believe it or not, everything you do is political.  Why not make your daily activities count for something?

Is lecturing your family members and friends about the changes that you think they should make in their lives effective?  I can tell you from personal experience that it isn’t.  I was an uppity little twenty-something many moons ago, telling everyone around me how it was and how it should be.  All it got me was a whole lot of pissed off relatives and friends who were sick and tired of listening to me.  I learned my lesson.  I stopped preaching.  Since my initiation into the world of activism and advocacy, I have come to understand that people are inherently curious, and that they will ask you questions with a sincere desire to understand if given the time and space to observe difference quietly and without fear of reprisal or judgement.

No one wants to be judged.  No one wants to be made to feel like they’re doing the wrong thing.  In my experience, people who lash out are doing so from a place of guilt about their actions (or inaction) in a particular part of their lives.  My beliefs and life practices are my business, and when someone else chooses to attack me for them, I now know that whatever has compelled them to do so is their business.  It has nothing to do with me.

For the people who don’t go on the offensive the moment they hear from a mutual acquaintance that I’m a vegetarian/vegan, concerned with animal welfare/rights, an environmentalist, a feminist, and a simple living advocate, they usually have questions for me about how I live because I’m not really what they would expect for someone with this set of labels to look like.  I live in suburbia, have a professional career, am married with 1.0 child, have two cats, and up until recently, had a dog.  Our lawn is green and weed-free (thanks to elbow grease, not chemicals).  None of the neighbours could possibly suspect or even imagine the subversion that’s going down in this house.

I guess I’m a subversive suburbanite, a suburban renegade if you will; less threatening-looking than a dreadlock-wearing university student, but packing an equal – if not greater for the wisdom I’ve accrued along the way – punch of social justice and eco-warrior-goddess-princess know-how to do Mother Nature proud.

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A.N. blogs at
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
about writing, blogging, and the rewards and challenges of carving out time from an already busy life to sustain her writing life. Contact her here.

A Lot Less Conversation. A Little More Action.

Tags

being your best self, blogging, conscious living, critical thinking, health, making a difference, notebooksandteacups, organic, personal politics, vegan, vegetarian, writing

I feel awful about not having posted last week.  I’m undertaking an herbal cleanse, and it’s been tough.  No excuses are acceptable when it comes to writing – I know, I know – but because I don’t want to write about nothing, or worse, try to write about something only to have it read like a psychologically damaged pigeon wrote it for all the sense it made, I decided to take a week off.

I was so pleased that my last post was well-received, at least by this blog’s standards, mainly because  it felt like a deviation from what I normally write about on the blog, and I wasn’t sure that this shift would be appreciated by my readers.  However, if the purpose of this blog is to unearth my writing life from the mess of my overall existence, then it stands to reason that the tone and purpose of this blog is going to change over time.

Today, I’d like to take the sentiments that I’ve espoused over my last couple of posts to their semi-logical conclusion, via a meandering path which I fully acknowledge to be long and rocky.  Forgive me.  To begin our journey, I’d like to share a personal story about how an individual, trying to make a difference in the world around them, accomplishes anything of value or measure despite their quantitative insignificance (as a single human being among seven billion others).

Because of my own life journey, taking risks and being true to my beliefs, I can attest to the fact that individual efforts can and do reap huge results.  I’m passionate about food, what to eat, what not to eat, and why, and this undying interest informs many of my personal life choices.  Over the past decade that I have been a vegetarian/vegan, I have engaged in hundreds of discussions about my food and lifestyle choices, both with those close to me and with more distant acquaintances with whom I may have dined only a small handful of times.  Often, I was the subject of ridicule and jokes during the meal, but more commonly, my dietary choices were discussed during the meal as a point of interest among my co-diners.  I will not pretend that having to discuss what I do or don’t eat every time I have a meal with a group of people doesn’t get tiring, because it does, but those little conversations have changed the eating habits of many of the people with whom I spoke.  For several others who did not decide to give up or reduce their consumption of animal products, they instead decided to switch to organic animal products after hearing about the human health ramifications associated with consuming animal-based foods from standard sources.  I became a vegetarian/vegan to disassociate myself completely from a system which inflicts unthinkable suffering on animals.  The fact that this choice also improved my health, reduced my grocery bill, benefited the environment, and introduced me to countless new foods, cuisines, and styles of cooking, provided a series of delightful and most welcomed surprises.  (I also thank my lifestyle choices for bringing my husband and I together, since we were both vegetarians when we met and this point was a contributing factor in getting us interested in one another at the beginning of our relationship.)

Why is this relevant to me today?  None of this is a novelty in my life.  I’ve always tried to do my very best to walk my talk, and the way I eat only makes up a tiny portion of the personal activities that I undertake to live by this motto.  Lately, I’ve felt the call to go deeper, to more closely examine what I’m consuming, what I’m feeding my family, and to make some more conscious decisions about what is entering our household, and our mouths.

I’ve long been interested in nutrition as a subject, but lately, it’s become more of an obsession.  I cannot consume enough information about nutrition at the moment, down to scientific minutiae that no sane person would ever concern themselves with.  So, I’m cleansing in an effort to re-boot my system, kill my sugar cravings (which may or may not be candida-related), end my addiction to caffeine once and for all, and give myself a feeling of general wellness to carry into my new healthier worldview about food.

When I feel good, I’m more productive, so my interest in getting healthier isn’t only about attaining some sort of superior state of being in my body.  The bottom line is that there are a lot of things I want to do, but I’m not fit to do anything when I feel like garbage.  I think that as we mistreat our bodies, our degeneration into a state of poor health is so gradual that we barely notice the downslide.  Stress, along with the habits of overeating sugar as my daily afternoon pick-me-up/stress buster and snacking on less than desirable snacks after we put our son to bed, have all contributed to my feeling less than in vibrant health.  I don’t know why, but I’ve become particularly sensitive to maladies which others seem to tolerate for years and years before their conditions worsen to the point that they require extreme medical intervention.  Perhaps it’s not so much a sensitivity as an unwillingness to allow myself to feel any worse than I already do.  I’m not sure.

What I am certain of is that any of us who wish to reach our fullest potential in our lives cannot afford to feel fatigued, constantly under slept, lethargic, achy, and foggy-headed.  These states of being will not allow us to live our best lives, because in them, we can barely make it halfheartedly through our days.  I don’t know about you, but I think that mediocrity is a vicious bastard who has lulled us into a sort of catatonic haze from which escape is incredibly difficult.  How easy it is to sail through life when you don’t expect anything of yourself!  How easy it is to pardon this folly in others, to co-exist within an extended social network of acquaintances who conveniently think the way that you do, if you can call blindly submitting to the status quo “thinking”.  And, how easy it is to allow the terms of our very lives to be determined for us by corporations whose only aim is to generate profits for shareholders.  (Profiteers are not interested in having the dulled, compliant masses living conscious, exciting lives.)  No one really cares about our physical, emotional, and spiritual health except us and those close to us.  Because of this, it is foolish of us to entrust our well-being to someone else, a disinterested third party.  It’s your health.  Own it because you are the only one responsible for it.

And when you’re feeling better, via whatever means work for you, use your new-found sense of wellness to take your share of the world and shake it up, kicking its ass as required.

So much talk.  So little action.  I have felt so awful lately that my blog wasn’t the only writing that went undone last week.  I’ve neglected most of my responsibilities and all of my writing.  How do I ever expect to achieve my writing goals when I let weeks pass without getting any work done?  It’s ridiculous, and I’m covered in shame at even sharing this with you.  I can only hope, that as I take additional strides towards the pursuit of good health, that my energy level will increase to a degree that I can start putting in that time (again).  While some of this year’s goals have changed, some omitted and others added, the gist of my desires remain the same.  To write.  To be an author.  To give you what I have, hoping that it improves your life.

Now if only I could wrap up a project so that you could read it.

* * *

A.N. blogs at
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
about writing, blogging, and the rewards and challenges of carving out time from an already busy life to sustain her writing life. Contact her here.

YOU are the starting point for activism

Tags

activism, being your best self, conscious living, critical thinking, making a difference, notebooksandteacups, personal politics, writing, writing as activism

Last week, I wrote about what I write about. This week, I’d like to discuss writing as social activism.

There are all sorts of ways to be active, to wear your politics. The moment you tell a friend that you believe that one thing is right or just over another, you’re being political. Signing an online or paper petition or donating to some charities over others puts you square in the armchair activism camp. Don’t shrink away from your label. Wear it with pride! You care and your actions are making a difference. I can’t think of a better way to spend one’s time than doing something to make the world better. It’s the small things that we do everyday that will accumulate into the hours needed to build the legacy that we’ll leave behind after we’re gone. Do you want to be remembered for being a marathon reality television episode watcher and a shoe accumulator, or would you rather be remembered as someone who tried to make the world a better place, and took steps to make it happen?

Personally, I want to leave a legacy of positive action, along with being remembered for loving my family and possessing a strong work ethic. These are the things that I value. As I mentioned last week, I’ve written primarily on social justice and other issues related to my ethical beliefs in the past, and intend to continue with this work in the future. I really believe that everyone has the opportunity to make a difference in whichever way suits them, and that all individual and group contributions are valuable. Making the world a better place, both for us who live today and for the generations to come, will only happen if individuals take steps in their lives to enact change in a positive way.

How does all of this tie in to writing? My lifelong dream is to be a writer. It’s all I’ve ever really wanted. It’s what I wake up in a panic over in the night because I haven’t accomplished what I had hoped to accomplish by this point in my life in this area. If my belief that we are all able to contribute our personal talents and aptitudes to making the world better is true, then surely I can spread the word about all the things I’ve learned and engage in as part of my own world-bettering practices in the hope that others will consider implementing some of these ideas in to their own lives. Alternatively, and more excitingly, simply sharing the notion that one can live a conscious life, one that isn’t influenced by advertisements or pop culture, and having others be awakened to their own beliefs and conscious living, is profound beyond measure. We’ve become a society of trudgers-through-our-days. I dream of a day when we’re a society of critical thinkers.

If you’re an artist, take pictures or create works of art about things that matter to you, and then share them. If you’re a writer, write about something important and get it out there. If you’re a gardener, large or small, become the environmental steward that those who are tied to the land have the potential – and in my opinion, responsibility – to be. If you keep a home, keep that home free of toxins, get educated about how processed and refined foods are killing us, and teach your kids that all people have value in equal measure. If you have to commute from the suburbs to a downtown office, consider alternate transportation options which will rid the thoroughfares of another single car driver. Make informed choices for yourself and your family which will undoubtedly benefit you in numerous ways, including financially, health-wise, and happiness-wise. It doesn’t matter who you are: there is something that you can contribute.

This blog is about uncovering my writing life, and tonight, I think I’ve unearthed and cast aside another boulder from the mountain which has buried my dreams.

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A.N. blogs at
http://notebooksandteacups.wordpress.com
about writing, blogging, and the rewards and challenges of carving out time from an already busy life to sustain her writing life. Contact her here.