Seeking Serenity

My bachelor’s degree is in English.  In the senior seminar class for this major, my college made the informal distinction between a teaching major and an academic major, the difference being the answer to “What are you going to do with that?” which is a question English majors get all the time.  Are you going to teach the subject to others?  Congratulations, you’re getting a teaching major.  Are you going to spend your time picking apart literature, writing scholarly articles, or becoming an editor?  Congratulations, you’re getting an academic major.

I was a teaching major.  My plan, in the grand scheme of things, was to teach high school English.  Obviously, God had other plans.  I did my stint working in a high school in a special education classroom, then in two different elementary schools in special education classrooms, and then in a daycare.  None of these classrooms really gave me a chance to do anything with my English major.

My family refers to me as the “resident English major.”  Often, I am presented with their writing to edit it for meaning and flow.  I’ve done various forms of creative writing since I was little, and now, I write for this blog as well.  But mostly, I write for myself.

Writing, like any hobby, is a skill that one improves through practice.  There are many who share tips on how to make writing a habit.  Daily pages (“write every day”), stream of consciousness (“write whatever is going through your mind at a given time”), prompts (topics to write about), and many other methods exist to get people writing and doing so consistently.

For the very ambitious, there are writing “events.”  For many writers, November is National Novel Writing Month, during which people attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in just thirty days.  I have tried this several times, and I have succeeded exactly once.  Veterans of this particular event say it is doable if you allow yourself to accept whatever comes from your brain and makes its way onto the page (or the computer screen).  The focus is on quantity and not quality.  “That’s what editing is for,” they say.  Just get it all out, and then you can make it into what you envisioned it to be in the first place.

This is very difficult for people with perfectionist tendencies such as myself, but I feel like it’s also a good exercise to engage in.  Sometimes you have to give yourself permission to accept what things are for the way they are.  The same is true in life, which is why we have the so-called Serenity Prayer.

Lord, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The Courage to change the things I can,

And Wisdom to know the difference.

With this mindset, hopefully it will be easier for us to accept our imperfections and, as the morning offering prayer of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales says, conduct ourselves each day in a manner pleasing to God.