focus

Measuring Time

~ livelytwist ~ 37 Comments

time

Over the years, I have heard people say, I don’t do New Year resolutions, as if resolutions are an unfashionable item of clothing. Me? I have no grouse with New Year resolutions; they are not like mosquitoes singing in my ear that I need to slap away.

You know that Angus and Phil cartoon where the two dogs are having a conversation? The one where Angus asks, “What exactly is a New Year’s resolution?” and Phil replies, “It’s a ‘To Do’ list for the first week of January,”? It has me in stitches every New Year when I see it on my newsfeed on Facebook. What is it about New Year resolutions and un-stickability? Are we so spineless? Perhaps we resolve to do better without looking at why we failed the year before.

I have come to believe the saying that men fail because of broken focus. I do not think of my goals at the start of the year as resolutions. These goals, which span spirituality, character, vocation, and health, are work-in-progress, whose expiry date can spill over from a previous year because sometimes distractions pose as good intentions and obliterate my focus. Focus requires clear targets. Sustaining focus becomes easy when I strip down what I want to achieve to bullet points and then marry them to small chunks of time. Then, I can be a vigilante one day at a time

Mostly, I wake up without an alarm and not long after, I reach for time—a watch, phone, or clock. Even on days that I can do as I please and do not need to look at the clock; I still catch myself glancing out the window gauging time by the slant of the sun, degree of cloud cover, or pace of life on the streets, to make meaning of our world. In a sense, all of us are measuring time. But if we take casual cognizance of time, the days and weeks would blend into one another. It would be like defying gravity and just floating in space, fascinating at first and pointless in the end. 

A friend reminded me that in 2015, he counted the days. When he said it, I imagined him standing in front of a huge calendar, striking out the days written in black ink, with red crayon. I saw how fast he flipped the calendar from month to month, achieving little. He said that in contrast, in 2016, he would make the days count. I like his rhetoric. For me, this means before I lay my head on my pillow at night, I would have taken at least one step in the direction of my goals. Then 365 days later, I will measure time and come up full.

Whether we call our aspirations resolutions or goals, how we spend our days becomes how we spend our lives.

 

©Timi Yeseibo 2016

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Shifting Gears [7]

~ livelytwist ~ 43 Comments

Making Good Art

eyelash
After I shared the picture above with a friend, she asked, “How much does your mascara cost?”

I replied, “17.50.”

Then she said, “In that case, you can cry as long as you want.”

We both laughed because I needed to laugh.

I cried this year, silent tears and loud tears, in the privacy of my bedroom.

And I nearly gave up, although I had begun the year high on momentum.

In his 2012 keynote address at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, author, Neil Gaiman, dispensed advice on a career in the arts. His advice transcends art and spills into life.

 

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art . . . Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

 

I cried in January, February, and March. My tears fell from April through September, like the rainy season in Nigeria, a deluge that began without warning. I determined to have an early dry season beginning in October. To ease my weariness, I planned to write short stories, flights of fantasy about love and technology. It worked. October looked promising until the mid-way point.

One Thursday, after a wailing session, I stopped deriving childlike pleasure from tasting the saltiness of tears and runny snot and reminded myself, I had a story to write. I shot an earnest plea to Heaven and brought out the notes I made as a friend recounted her experience on the train. Then I zoned out everything and entered the place where stories come to me.

Before I published Bluetooth Lottery, I gave it to a friend to read. I watched him chuckle while he read and stopped holding my breath. This story, I thought, might resonate with readers. My blog posts that create the most emotional resonance, going by likes and comments, are posts I wrote from places of desperate despair or posts about the tattoos in my soul.

 

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

 

Are Gaiman’s words about making your art to be taken literally?

I heard someone say that when you speak from your head, you talk to people’s heads, but when you speak from your heart, you talk to people’s hearts. After a writer shared a heartbreaking ordeal with me, I asked her if she was going to write about it.

“No,” she shrugged, “but you know how these things work, right? Our experiences seep into our writing and wet the page.”

I nodded.

Tears became my friend this year and I did not resent her intrusion into small spaces. I realized firstly that the demons that troubled me were not new. They were conquered foes, old fears in shiny wrapping paper. Secondly, to borrow from the title of Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir, one day I will write about this place, this field of tears. I will gather my tears and then I will sit and make good art.

 

As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a spring; the early rain also covers it with pools.
– Psalm 84:6

 

©Timi Yeseibo 2015
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Two Years On

~ livelytwist ~ 79 Comments

Two

My blog is one way by which I measure time. April marks two years since I began blogging. The earth spins on its axis as it revolves round the sun. The moon pulls the oceans and lets them go. If I did not write, the earth, sun, and moon, would not have stopped for me and I cannot imagine what else could have filled my days so.

Self-discipline is the hallmark of my journey. It is the ability to make yourself do what must be done.

When I’m in the zone, I could write forever. Ideas ooze from me and words tumble out faster than I can type them—I abandon current thought and scroll down the page to type perfect sentences and beautiful dialogue, falling from heaven like gold dust.

Many times, I’m out of sorts. Experiences burn me and disappointment visits nearly every day. My head hurts and my emotions are pink like cut salmon. I sing, tired oh so tired, and I’m too tired to compose a new song. I question which direction to take my blog or if I should quit. And most of all, I don’t feel like writing. Not writer’s block, but an insidious lethargy, which is akin to living with a low-grade fever.

I’m not unique in this regard. This is how we sometimes feel about our jobs and responsibilities. When did the things we love become a prison that we long to escape? But we show up at our jobs and dance on the stage of our lives anyway.

 

One Friday evening I’m moaning about how I don’t feel like writing.

My friend nods in understanding, “No, you don’t have to, it’s your blog. Not like anyone is paying you to. I’m sure people would understand.”

She is right. However, I can’t miss a Sunday post. Maybe it’s because growing up, my mum pushed me to outdo myself. Or it’s the result of my school principal repeating at assembly, “What is worth doing is worth doing well.”

“Yeah, but I have to,” I say.

 

So, that night, I discipline myself to write about an incident involving a friend and then launch into a broader conversation about what we value as a society. Disciplining myself to write means that I turn down many invitations, adjust my sleeping habits, watch less soaps, and read more stuff.

I muster all my skills and still feel as though the article could be better. Bloodshot eyes and new streaks of grey; five hours later, I know I have nothing more to give.

Eventually the article resonates with readers as reflected in the comments and shares.  In a sense, this is the reward of diligence—pushing past inner and outer turmoil and insisting on excellence from myself. The discipline of writing weekly provides momentum for those times when I’m flat. Still, I shake my head. I know this, and in fact all I’ve achieved, isn’t my doing. A wise man said:

The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant
or favour to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

If this is my time, then my blog has been my chance. And self-discipline would mean nothing if I didn’t have readers like you encouraging me week after week.

Thank you!

 

 

© Timi Yeseibo 2015

 

Photo credit: http://pixabay.com/en/digits-pay-123-1-2-3-series-705666/

 

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Timi Yeseibo and livelytwist.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

I Do

~ livelytwist ~ 61 Comments

I do

Some people believe that after they’ve met The One, they could never develop feelings for another. I think that if we are blindfolded we may be unable to distinguish touch from touch. This is not an argument against monogamy, but for focus.

In his book Outliers, The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell says that hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning1.  In making the point that excellence requires a critical minimum level of practice, he says ten thousand hours is the magic number that researchers have agreed on for true expertise2. That’s an awful amount of focus.

Livelytwist and I have been married for a year and as much as she has pleasured me past our honeymoon weekend of 2,000 views, family, friends, work, hobbies, books, TV, social media, and a hundred other commitments compete for my attention. If I have achieved any kind of excellence in this marriage, it is because I rarely let anything come between Livelytwist and me.

Our marriage has not been without its challenges. Although I spend hours conjuring word pictures to process big ideas, promoting these ideas beyond my small circle tasks me. Learning how to ‘shout’ on Twitter and Facebook does not excite me. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.3

I remember that at twelve or thirteen, my mum gave me the talk.

“You’ve started your period. From now on, if a boy touches you like this,” she tapped my arm, “you’ll get pregnant!”

I did not take her words to heart. But the next day, as I played tag with the kids on my street, the horror of how many times I could get pregnant weighed on my heart. At dinnertime, I watched the boys run to their homes while I trudged to mine, sure that my stomach had already started swelling. I stopped playing tag after that.

My mother had successfully sold me her abstinence formula, which I bought until I turned sixteen and the boys came to play tag in droves. Only then did she change her marketing strategy.

Where I come from, we call every carbonated drink Coke. Such is the brand dominance Coca-Cola enjoys, and yet the company still spends millions on advertising.  I realise that I must first write posts that resonate with readers, before I figure out how to get them to read it, and then be ready to change when my methods age.

At the same time, I do not want to be that guy at the airport, who you ask, “What do you do?” and he answers, “I’m in sales, and you?” Then while your lips are opening, he tells you about his eBooks, his tenor rising, rising, dropping, rising, rising, as he shoves a Kindle in your face. You cannot get a word in edgeways, so you promise to buy at least one book and make a mental note to go for confession. When you throw the bookmark he gave you in the bin, all that remains from the encounter is the smell of musk.

The first indicator that someone outside my close circle was anticipating my blog post came a few months after I started blogging.

Lively, how far? It’s 2 p.m. here and we’ve been waiting all day for your blog post.

This email from a reader via my contact form proved that my walk was louder than any talk I could have given for he had noticed my Sunday-Sunday consistency. It changed the game for me. I shovelled out my doubts about blogging and said, “I do” to Livelytwist.

All of you who share my posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and by word-of-mouth, are my connectors to the rest of the world. Your referrals are fresh like 8 a.m. doughnuts and relevant like Google. You helped me stay faithful to Livelytwist. At every crossroad, you lifted the lamp of love, and I saw in your face, the road that I should take.

Thank you.

 

©Timi Yeseibo 2014

 

Related posts from Livelytwist:

https://livelytwist.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/wordpress-103-recruiting-followers/

https://livelytwist.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/wordpress-104-in-search-of-content/

 

  1. Gladwell, Malcom, Outliers, The Story of Success, (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 175
  2. Ibid., 43 – 44.
  3. Peter Drucker Quote: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/p/peterdruck154444.html

 

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Timi Yeseibo and livelytwist.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.