Don't Look Up the Mountain

(We interrupt your regularly programmed posts to bring you this announcement:
NY State is SO CLOSE to stopping marriage discrimination against same sex couples. Call Senator Andrew Lanza today to help. All you have to do is give your name and say you support Marriage Equality. That's it. No arguing or defense necessary. Basically he just needs to hear that most people do support this.
Number is (718) 984-4073, and you don't have to be a NY resident. PLEASE HELP.
Okay anyway, back to blogging!)

I went to my friend's ordination at the New Seminary (interfaith church of awesome, basically) last Sunday. There were some great speakers from all walks of faith, and it was so cool to hear prayers and songs from many religions side-by-side.

But one speaker in particular caught my attention.

She was co-president of the 2011 class, and along with my friend, a newly ordained Reverend. At the start of her speech, she mentioned that she is one of the youngest graduates in 2011. She wasn't sure what advice she could offer the other grads, most of whom have had more life experiences than her.

But then she remembered something her father told her.

Before she started classes at the seminary, when she was just finishing college, she started to panic about what she'd do with her life. She had all these exams and final projects, and on top of that she had no idea what she was planning to do with the Bachelor's degree she worked so hard to earn. She had no new goals, no set purpose in her life, no idea where to go.

Her dad took her by the shoulders and said, "Don't look up the mountain."

Don't worry about your ultimate goal. Don't worry about how impossibly far away it looks right now, or wonder how you'll ever reach it. Don't worry about anything but the present moment. Placing one foot in front of the other as you climb. Keep climbing, keep striving, but don't stop to look up the mountain.

This struck me as such a perfect metaphor for writing. We get this brilliant idea, and we envision the finished novel in our head, and it is fantastic. But then we start to write, and it becomes a muddled mess, and we wonder how the hell we're ever going to fix the 8 million problems it already has, and how we'll ever finish the rest of it when we only wrote 200 words today, and we're tempted to call it quits and just go watch X-Men marathons instead.

We have to remember: "Don't look up the mountain."

Focus on what you can do today. What you can solve. And then do it. Write one scene. Fix that one paragraph. If that's all you do today, that's fine. You'll fix something else tomorrow, until eventually you'll look up, and realize there are no more rocks to climb beneath your feet. And when you do look up, you'll already be at the top of the mountain.