goals | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Mark Batterson, in The Circle-Maker, a fascinating book on a prayer, praises “defining decisions,” that set the course of your life, sort of like choosing whether you drive to Slovenia (which our family did last summer), or to Scotland (which we might do this summer).

I made three defining decisions in my twenties. Chronologically: I decided to become a writer. I decided to follow Jesus. And I decided to take a marriage vow to love.

Yeah, well…

I have failed in all of these, continually. There have been days, weeks, months, and years, in which I have not written at all. I sometimes think of my beloved Jesus sadly: how imperfectly I imitate him. And marriage, well.

Yet, oddly, I’ve not failed in any of these, because I am still on the road. I am writing, albeit less than I would like to. I am still following after Jesus, albeit imperfectly. I am still married, more or less happily.

* * *

Oh, it is this season again, this season of resolutions. And I will probably make some.

But what I am more interested in are defining decisions, North Stars, compass points, things I will continue to do even if I sometimes go off course. Things that I will continue doing, even if I fall. Not resolutions I make year after year like Yom Kippur sacrifices, but a once-and-for-all decision I will follow, though I may wobble, and fail some days, some weeks…

Here are a few of my defining decisions, which I return to again and again. These are to do with health

1 I will walk 10,000 steps a day.

2 I will avoid sugar

3 I will avoid white flour (using bread, pasta and noodles as a treat, rather than as food).

4 I will begin reading myself to sleep at 10 p.m.

5 I will do some yoga every day (a habit I am struggling to adopt).

These are habits which are not yet second nature. There are other habits which are second nature, though again I fail some days, some weeks, some months….

I will spend time with God

I will read or listen to my Bible.

I will read.

I will write at least a little.

I will keep the rooms in which I work and sleep tidy.

I will garden.

* * *

How about you? Instead of a resolution, different every year, why not try a defining decision which you will return to, despite falls and wobbles, as we continue trying to follow Jesus, though like Peter, we might forget him, deny him, and yearn to go on a break.

In praise of tiny goals

By Anita Mathias

I know many people who want to write books they haven’t completed—and I, alas, am one of them.

The standard advice for writing a book? Ray Bradbury, Stephen King or Donald Miller recommend 1000 words a day. If people did that, they’d publish 4-6 books in a year, Miller says.

More commonly, writing gurus recommend 500 words a day, which gives you 182,500 words a year—i.e. 2-3 books of average length. However, how many writers do you know who publish 2 to 3 books in a year?

500 words a day is more challenging than it seems, apparently.

Because….Life!!

* * *

But how about slice that finer? 250 words a day? Which makes for 91,000 words a year. One long book.

1000 words is too challenging for me. I have streaks of the perfectionist. I get distracted. I get tired. I have a life, a very full one. And I need to work on my health, which is partly built by exercise. And I want to make time for my spiritual life, my family life, my social life, my house and garden. A consistent 500 words every day I find challenging for the same reasons. If I do it consistently, other things slip.

But 250 words? 250 words. Beautiful. Piece of cake. Blink of an eyelash. Not quite, but I can often write it, and revise the previous day or two’s words in half an hour. Perhaps it’s psychological–1000 words or 500 seems like a lot; 250 words feels like nothing. If you’ve read this far, you’ve read 267 words.

But 250 words a day adds up to a long book a year.

And isn’t it better to have a low goal, and reach it than a lofty one which sneers at you when, more days than not, you fall short?

So last week, I wrote 250 words a day six days a week on my memoir, did not miss a single day, and took new ground every day. So easy, so joyous, and how quickly it gets done.

* * *

Mid-life is a time for radical changes. And change, revision of life, excites me. But what I am trying is what the Japanese call kaizen—making big changes in the smallest measurable increments, a technique used brilliantly to change the corporate culture and increase productivity in Japanese companies. I am making changes in the smallest possible increments—using a app, Runkeeper, that gives me feedback as I walk so that most days I increase my speed and distance by a few seconds a mile, and a tiny increment of a mile; slowly improving the efficiency of my housekeeping practices; slowly but radically changing my diet; and writing more by aiming at less.

Everest is climbed step by step, and slow progress means you are more likely to get there smiling.

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules, ” Trollope wrote, who wrote daily and steadily for 35 years, producing 49 novels.

So off I go then to write 250 words.

Goodbye to Everest

By Anita Mathias

When I was six years old, I wanted to be the first woman to climb Everest.

Well, I won’t be. That was Junko Tabei, a Japanese woman–a record which will forever be hers.

And neither will be I be the oldest person to climb Everest. That’s Yuichiro Muira, who climbed Everest aged 80. Nope, not going to train for decades to beat him (though it would guarantee keeping superbly fit!)

Ah, Everest. Shimmering Everest. A savage place, holy and enchanted. You have long inhabited the landscape of my imagination, and that is where you will stay. South Col, the Death Zone, the Khumbu Icefall, a river of ice with frozen cascades and romantic crevasses deep as a fifteen story building which abruptly open or close. Sheer faces of ice to be scaled with axes and ropes. Blizzards and avalanches; seracs: massive tottering blocks of ice; 360 degree views that stagger the mind–it’s all part of the architecture of my soul.

I will never climb Everest. The practicality of middle age forces me to admit this.

Because. I do not really like walking uphill. I am afraid of slipping. And I am afraid of heights! I am nervous on narrow mountain paths with precipitous drops. I do not enjoy extreme cold. And I really like warm clean private toilets and hot baths, and these will be in short supply on Everest.

As though as Jon Krakauer writes, commercial expeditions (in which barely fit socialites like Sandy Pittman are hauled to the summit by hardy sherpas) have made it possible for the just-about-fit to summit, I feel no call to devote two or three years to get fit enough to plausibly think of summiting Everest without dying in the attempt.

Everest in a vision once I saw.

The beautiful dream of climbing Everest, that symphony, that song, was just that, alas: a young girl’s dream.

Some dreams are meant to be dreams, dazzling dreams of the night, but not of the day. You imagine peaks bathed rose and orange by the rising run, and rivers and mountains of ice, and they are glorious. You look at photographs, read accounts of exploration and watch documentaries, and your soul thrills.

Everest has added beauty to your life. You do not need not haul oxygen bottles up to the summit, and stagger up the last few steps in the death zone, behind the long files of those who summit for bragging rights, or take your mandatory selfie where the earth stops and the flags of the nations flutter. You have travelled there in imagination. You have Everest within. There you on honey dew have fed and drunk the wine of paradise

* * *

I have another dream: Antarctica. No–not walking to the South Pole like Scott or Amundsen, just seeing it on a cruise ship. A friend got to do it for free, and write about it for the American Express magazine. I looked up prices.

But school fees, school fees. Antarctica or school fees? I am a good Indian mama, after all. Antarctica must wait.

Wait forever? Perhaps not. But should it wait for the rest of this life, my soul has been enriched by male Emperor penguins waiting out the long sunless winter, guarding their eggs; the great glaciers calving off into massive icebergs; crevasses into which you simply disappear; gleaming snowy expanses in which one could wander directionlessly forever.

I met Geraldine MacCaughrean at a Writers in Oxford /Society of Authors party a few years ago. Our family had listened to her White Darkness in the car, a description of Antarctica so vivid that it makes you shiver, and reach for a sweater. “Have you been to Antarctica?” I asked. “Oh no,” she said, frowning, shaking her head, and laughing.

She was a writer. Imagination and research can make Antarctica as vivid to ourselves and to our readers as if we had actually travelled there.

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for? Robert Browning wrote.

Our imagination and longing exceeds what we can do in this life, with its adamantine parameters of strength, time and money. God imposes some limitations on us; others are the fruit of our own imperfect choices.

And though we never grow too old to dream another dream and set another goal–some dreams, most dreams perhaps, will remain dreams. And that’s what a heaven’s for.

In eternity, which will far exceed this life, as this life exceeds the wildest imaginings of a foetus crouched in the dark and wet of the womb, I will fly and soar over Everest and over Antarctica. I will gaze at the views, and shiver with pleasure. And I shall be very warm while doing so.

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Some dreams must be abandoned, like some writing projects. Nonetheless, they have enriched your life. From @anitamathias1

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

By Anita Mathias

I enjoy the One Word project. Instead of a resolution, one asks God for a prophetic word as a guide for the year.

My word for 2014 was alignment. I have chosen Joy as the word to return to this year. When I find myself stressed, distressed, angry, worried or simply sad, I am learning to stop what I am doing, and pray until peace and clarity returns, accepting the things I cannot change, changing the things I can…

One word, alas, can be constraining for a woman whose work is words…

* * *

My biggest trauma of 2014 was colon cancer. It was not metastatic, thankfully, but because lymph nodes were involved, I was given an estimate of my chances of being alive in 5 years!!

Anyway, fortunately, the median is not the message as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in this popular essay. He was given 8 months to live aged 40, and lived for 20 years, dying at 60 of an unrelated cancer. He writes

Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know why (from my old-style materialistic perspective, I suspect that mental states feed back upon the immune system). But match people with the same cancer for age, class, health, socioeconomic status, and, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, with commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything doctors say, tend to live longer. A few months later I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.

And God, the great mathematician, is known to upset human stats. (Consider Janet Walton given 104 billion to 1 odds of bearing healthy sextuplets. Which was exactly what she did.)

However, estimates of your chances of being alive—even decent odds, as in my case–focuses the mind. “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Johnson wrote.

In the first shock and sadness after the diagnosis, I wandered through the house, looking at the books I had not yet read, but really wanted to; the documentaries I had not watched, but really wanted to; the books I had not written, but really wanted to; thinking of the places to which I had never travelled, but rather wanted to. I did not want to die. I was in love with life.

I was sad.

Then, who knows how, I snapped out of sadness.

* * *

I had prayed with faith for healing. Why should I proceed as if God was definitely ignore my prayers? That’s crazy behaviour for a believer. God is my Father; why should I hurt his feelings by doubting his goodness.

Fifty springs are little room to look at things in bloom, the poet A. C. Housman wrote. So since, in the Upper Room discourse at the Last Supper, Jesus repeatedly urges us to ask for anything we wish, I asked, playfully, for 50 additional years of life, which would get me to the age at which my great-grandmother Julianna died. (I come from a line of long-lived woman on both sides of the family, thriving into their nineties, often living past a hundred, women who lived on ancestral diets–not the Western diet I have indulged in for the last 30 years.)

And so, while I am steadily changing my diet in the direction of optimum nutrition, and steadily increasing my exercise, I decided to plunge back into work I really wanted to do. Work one loves–a great and mysterious extender of life.

* * *

I started work on a memoir in 1991—an account of a Catholic childhood in Jamshedpur, a Zoroashtrian company town; rebellious years in a boarding school in Nainital, in the foothills of the Himalayas, run by German and Irish nuns; and then working with Mother Teresa at Calcutta.

However, I shelved it numerous times: to write essays; to teach Creative Writing at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg; for four years to establish a business; and then for another five years, I barely worked on it while I blogged.

Chapters have met with success. They have won a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship; a Jerome Fellowship: have won “Writer of Unusual Promise” awards to writing conferences, have been published in Best Spiritual Writing, Commonweal, London Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Notre Dame Magazine. I am certain that it will be a good book–though a long one in the first draft (which will definitely need a good editor).

I realized that if I died without finishing it, and publishing it (I am thinking of indie publishing the first longer version) I would feel enormous, almost unbearable sadness and regret, because it took me time and sacrifice to get a good first draft.

But if I died without developing my blog to dizzy heights, so be it. C’est la vie. Blogging has been enormously rewarding in psychological, spiritual, creative, personal growth, social and career ways…a trip to Cambodia, for instance… Who would have guessed? It has brought me nearly 10,000 readers a month, some of whom have become real life friends. The confidence and support a large and steady readership brings cannot be underestimated.

* * *

So I will work on the memoir first, writing 500 words a day. A long memoir averages 120,000 words, which means I could be done with it in less than 8 months; much has already been written, and I already have a first draft. Sounds good, huh?

I will shoot for 500 words rather than 1000, for that will leave time for walking, gardening, housework, prayer, family life, friendships as well as gas in the tank for another day’s writing.

500 words… I might be able to write that in an hour if I focus. Perhaps two hours if I shoot for beautiful words. In a widely shared piece, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet attributed their success to that fact that they knew how to focus.

And that is my work goal for 2015: Focus

I am using an app called Freedom to turn off the internet when I write. I really enjoy the quiet and concentration of being in the zone, and get so much done when the internet is off.

So I will write my 500 words, and then blog–a blog or two or three a week as the Lord gives me strength and energy.

I had a mentor, whose book I edited. He said he would write as the Lord provided time. I thought privately, “One can’t write like that!” But both his books are still read in a world in which bloggers publish books to a three week buzz, books which are often dead in six months, and forgotten in a year.

Apparently relying on the Lord for words and time is a very good work strategy indeed!

My One Word for 2015 : Joy

By Anita Mathias

I had wanted to choose “Accelerate” as my One Word for 2014 but God impressed “Alignment” on my heart, and it proved to have been useful through a tumultuous year—a cancer diagnosis, and surgery, the death of my beloved border collie Jake from cancer, a burglary. And some nice things too… being invited to Cambodia for a week by Tearfund; being the runner up for Tweeter of the Year in the Christian New Media Awards; being interviewed on Premier Radio; publishing a children’s book, Francesco, Artist of Florence.

* * *

That cancer now a past tense occurrence, God willing, all gone.

Because I could not stop for health, health kindly stopped for me. Health will be one of my priorities this year

I will have to be careful about diet and exercise–so as not to have a recurrence. My body will have to change its bioeme to become an ecosystem unfavourable to cancer. I will learn stress management techniques, and practice positive psychology, thinking positively. I am juicing to get my diet more nutrient-dense, and am moving towards a raw and plant-based diet.

I thought of choosing “Focus,” as my word for the year because huge things can be done with focus, but no, I had a greater need.

My word for 2015 will be Joy.

* * *

I am training myself to become conscious of my emotional states, of when joy leaches out of me, and am learning to slow down and ask, “Why are you sad, oh my soul?”

And then, I am learning to accept the things I cannot change, and to change the things I can, as in the brilliant Serenity Prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous, and to be thankful for the rest, the obviously good things, and the more ambiguous things–for there is a God who is writing straight in crooked lines in my life. Again and again, I see this.

When I notice I am grumpy and low-spirited, I tell myself, “Anita, light the sacred flame of joy.” I visualise myself as a priestess in a temple filling the sacred bowl with incense, the seeds of joy, lighting the flame. I start noticing the good things, thanking God for the good things. I ask the Holy Spirit—who, Jesus says, comes on demand–to fill me with joy, those rivers of living water, and He does.

We can change our emotional states, as blogger Michael Hyatt writes. He calls being able to do this his most important asset.

I shift my emotional state by entering the narrow gates of surrender to God. By deciding to walk in love. By praise and thanksgiving. By worship music. By reading a bit of the Bible or a spiritual book. By physical activity, a walk outdoors, or even just tidying the house. By spending time with my family or seeking out a friend to hang out with.

* * *

19 years ago, I told a good friend Paul Miller (author of A Praying Life, often praised as one of the best books on prayer, for instance by Tim Challies) that I had not experienced joy-as opposed to happiness. He volunteered to disciple me in exchange for editing help, and this discipling relationship lasted for 5 years. Joy, he said, comes from dying, from dying to self.

I did not stumble upon joy through “dying;” that was not my path. (However, I learned other things from Paul, about Jesus–I was an editor for his book Love Walked Among Us–about love, and faith, and prayer).

Nonetheless, I was eventually surprised by joy. Joy and peace crept up on me, as my original ambitions were thwarted, and the fierceness of ambition leached away, leaving more of an openness to what God might be doing in my life, to the plot he was writing. To giving God what he takes, and taking what he gives, with a smile—Mother Teresa’s definition of holiness.

So in 2015, I want to experience joy, by seeking it where it lies in plain sight, and if necessary, hunting it down, looking a little harder, a little deeper. I want to light the flame of joy with the incense of praise, of thanksgiving, of faith, of Scripture, of nature, of friendship, all the good and precious things which come down from the Father of Lights.

And if you’d like to pray for me, please pray for vibrant health and that cancer never returns. Eight weeks after surgery, I am glad to report that I feel full of energy, good spirits, health and…yes…joy!

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One Word for 2015: Joy. On lighting the sacred flame of joy from @anitamathias1

Have you chosen a one word goal for 2015? What is it?

The Creative’s Planner, 2016

By Anita Mathias

I have designed my own 2016 Planner to plan and organise my creative work, and the other things I want to keep track of. I used the blueprint in 2014, and found it brought clarity to my day and increased my productivity.

Here it is if you’d like to order a copy. On Amazon.com and on Amazon.co.uk.

It is a traditional Appointment Diary.

But there are also sections for

Food Records

A column of the usual Appointment Diary is devoted to keeping track of meals eaten. Studies say you lose twice as much weight if you record what you eat (though sadly I often forget to).

There’s a column to check if they are healthy. Keeping track of the healthiness allows for mid-course adjustments.

There’s a little box to record your daily weight, if that’s important to you.

5 Reasons for Gratitude

Space to record five things you are grateful for. Recording reasons for gratitude leads to a 25% increase in happiness, and better health. It leads to “higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy.” Those who record their blessings experience “less depression and stress, were more likely to help others, exercised more regularly, and made greater progress towards achieving personal goals.”

10,000 Steps

The consensus is that 10,000 steps a day is the minimum necessary for good health, according to Britain’s NHS. It also spurs creativity. I usually fall short of this, but 2015 is a new year!!

Recording steps, and one’s progress is motivational. I use an Omron HJ-112 Digital Pocket Pedometer , very reliable.

Three Creative Projects

Donald Miller suggests working on no more than three projects at a time. I like the idea; it gives clarity. It is very peaceful and freeing.

What I Get to Enjoy Today

Listing the simple good things— time with family, reading, gardening, a walk, prayer, tidying a messy room, listening to worship music while you tidy up, a movie perhaps—helps you face your day with anticipation and joy.

If I Could Live Today Again

Another idea from Donald Miller. If you were to do a do-over of the day, what would you do? List it in the morning.

If day after day you list the same things and do not do them, something is very wrong.

Lastly,

A To Do List

Go on, order a 2015 Creative’s Planner for yourself or your favourite creative; clarify and organize your life; increase your productivity, (and support Dreaming Beneath the Spires in the process)

The Creatives’ Planner, on Amazon.com ($11.99)

The Creatives’ Planner on Amazon.co.uk (£9.99)

Here’s a glimpse of what a page looks like.

Thanks. Enjoy!

New Year’s Resolutions, 2014 : A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

By Anita Mathias

Mountain_Path_Stock_by_MirandaRose_Stock

(credit)

“The essential thing “in heaven and in earth” is that there should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality– anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

29% of people break their New Year’s resolutions by Jan 14th.

I have cunningly beaten those odds by not formulating them until Jan 14^th!!

No new projects this year–phew!!–just working on my ongoing goals, but with alignment with God and his power, and hopefully more focus, discipline and wisdom. A long obedience in the same direction.

* * *

So I’m peeking at my 2013 goals and hopes, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and formulating my 2014 goals.

Writing

A) I am hoping to complete and publish my memoir, Mind Has Mountains, this year. Have organized it, and written some chapters.

B) Bible Blogging—I have blogged quite a bit on Genesis and Matthew, and would like to complete my reflections on these books, and publish them.

C) “Little Books: ”What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects–with their Christianity latent.” C. S. Lewis

I wrote a little meditation on the Beatitude “The Meek Inherit the Earth,” and an illustrated picture book, “Francesco: Artist of Florence,” last year. The latter is still being illustrated, but will hopefully be on Amazon within a month.

D) Blogging goals—Post 5-6 days a week, taking Sunday off. Do shorter posts (200-500 words) and do more guest posts for other bloggers.

Try to write evergreen posts which can still be read and enjoyed in a year or five years.

II Health and Weight. Diet and Exercise

I lost 5 pounds in 2012, and 10 in 2013.

I would like to lose 26 in 2014 (but won’t be crushed if I lose 11).

How? Steadily build up endurance, walking at least 10,000 steps every day, and 1-3 longer walks every week.

Am doing Yoga most days, because it induces a “change of state,” like prayer does. It helps me feel calm, clear-headed, mentally fresh, emotionally at peace, tension and conflict resolved with all that stretching, quietness and breathing. The mind and body, well, they are inextricable!!

Diet—I plan to avoid sugar and white flour as much as possible. Limit carbs; increase veggies.

I have been physically healthy this year, just one cold and cough, no flu or other illnesses, no doctor visits. That’s because I have changed my diet, having green smoothies 2-3 times a day, and lots of salad and veggies. I have eccentrically been having a spinach and romaine salad with feta and olives for breakfast along with my green smoothie, and intend to continue this!

Am slowly moving to eating more vegetables and beans and fewer carbs.

Am planning to watch out for emotional eating, and only eat when hungry. And ask, “Is this going to be a blessing to my body?”

A Stickk commitment helped—I handed over $5 to charity every week that I did not achieve my weight loss goal of .5 lb!! It kept me focused on how exactly I was doing, and to see beyond daily fluctuations. It made me 10 pounds thinner, and well–poorer too!

III Waking Early

In “The Circle-Maker” Mark Batterson, wrote that early rising is the most important predictor of spiritual AND occupational success.

Last year’s goal was 5 a.m., and I reached 6 a.m. I plan another gradual assault on 5 a.m.

IV Domestic Order

I read once that most gifted under-achievers live in domestic chaos. And I did for a while.

However, since 2008, we’ve had a cleaner once a week, which means we’ve picked everything up for the cleaner once a week. But I haven’t reached William Morris’s and my own domestic ideal of having “nothing in my house that I do not believe to be beautiful or know to be useful.” Or my ideal of having everything in its place.

What’s really helped me since August has been the 365 less things project of getting rid of one thing a day. (Well, okay, I get rid of 7 things the day the cleaner comes).

It’s helped because of the paradigm shift—What am I not using? What can I get rid of? I usually get rid of far more than 7 things. And anticipate having a house with nothing in it that’s neither beautiful nor useful within 1-3 years.

At the moment, I am finishing the decluttering in our bedroom, and working on my study and the library. We bought a romantic, old rambling house, bigger than we needed, which means we have more housework…

V Gardening

I wanted to resume gardening last year, and did so a bit, but then it got dark early, and I got absorbed in writing.

Maybe once I wake earlier, I will have time to do some work in the garden in these short January days.

VI Reading

I so want to recover the girl whose greatest delight was reading, but since I believe in small changes, I will be content if I read one book more than I did last year.

I have started switching off my computer an hour before bedtime to tidy our bedroom, do some yoga, and read myself to sleep, so have that reading slot, and read in the first thing in the morning slot, and a little bit before I write to get the rhythms of good writing into my blood.

The secret of forming a new habit is to find a slot for it, and I am working on that.

So I hope to continue working on these goals, more a long obedience in the same direction, than New Year’s resolutions.

On “Defining Decisions” Rather Than New Year’s Resolutions

In praise of tiny goals

Goodbye to Everest

One Work Goal for 2105: Focus

My One Word for 2015 : Joy

The Creative’s Planner, 2016

New Year’s Resolutions, 2014 : A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

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