Early in 2011 I ran into this blog post on the concept of “living as if.” In a nutshell, the premise is that if you want to be something, behave as if you are. It is, at a certain level, a simplistic notion. Just do it, as it were. But there is a power to that simplicity. And there is a power to the idea that if you want to be a good person you must merely act as if you are.
Since reading that I’ve tried to implement the idea a bit. I am trying to live as if I am a person who actually attends to her correspondence. And it seems to be mostly working, in that I only have one lingering email at the moment that I really should answer. And miraculously, by behaving as if I am the sort of person who does things like paying her car registration immediately upon receiving the notice, for the first time in nine years of owning my car I got (and put on) my new tags in March, though my registration didn’t expire until May. I mean really this was a major accomplishment. There’s a reason all my reoccurring bills automatically get charged to a credit card. I’ve never managed to be flaky enough to get any utilities shut off but for someone who fronts as all responsible and adult-like I’m astoundingly bad at things like paperwork and bill paying. I would do well to incorporate some other responsible adult behaviors. Things like scheduling dentist appointments and a check-up with my doctor. I wish behaving as if I were a person who exercises regularly didn’t require the actual exercise part. But that too, I should work on.
For right now, though, I merely would like to be a writer. You know, the sort of person who writes on a regular basis.
And so here we are. I haven’t been writing as much as I would like to be in any form. I’m going to try to move toward a habit of writing something (blog, poem, journal entry, real email, letter, whatever) daily. I have in the past couple of years moved back toward writing poetry, but it is not yet second nature enough that I find myself doing it without setting aside time to do it (perhaps this is just a reflection on how my time is spent now compared to when I was younger and writing easily and often).
Unrelated to all of that, today I discovered that one of the passion fruit vines I started from seed is blooming. I have a plant that I bought from Henry Fields, which flowers prolifically and produces a bit of fruit here and there since last year. But it’s primarily a decorative variety. The fruit is edible but not as good as other varieties. Finding plants is hard, though. So I ended up starting a couple from seed. They’re slow to germinate and a bit finicky (well, really, I’m just not very trustworthy when it comes to taking care of delicate new seedlings). But I’ve got two big vines. I’m not entirely sure which plants are which but they are some combination of purple passion fruit and/or fragrant granadilla. And for the first time, one of the two vines started from seed is flowering. I literally jumped for joy and clapped my hands when I saw it.
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