I got to come home this week again. And today I saw this image float by on my Facebook stream. I’ve always been a big fan of the “Neverending Story”–both in its movie and its original book form (Side note: Michael Ende wrote an amazingly deep, complex, and accessible story I actually got to study in a German seminar on the Fantastic in college. If you ever needed a reason to study German, I would suggest this book would be another argument in favor of that pursuit.). The quote the folks at Spirit Science & Metaphysics posted on the screen capture of Bastian riding Fuchur the Glueksdrache is a great way of describing how I feel about being back with my husband: “There are people we meet in life that make everything seem magical. Cherish them.” Even the projection of more cold weather during my visit can’t dampen my spirits. Especially since we’ve been working on a plan to move up our timeline to when we’re together again full time.
🙂
I also got the bonus of having one of my class assignments canceled this week, so I didn’t have to worry about the travel time required to get home, or the annual Palm Sunday family gathering, sabotaging my academic success. In fact, my professor granted me a few bonus points this week for having attended an optional live session that didn’t meet his standards. I even worked on my short story, got some house cleaning/organizing done for my mom, met my walking goals, AND got to go see “Captain America: Winter Soldier”. It’s amazing how proper motivation and shared time with the right people can amp your productivity. (I even snuck in some reading time while we were stuck on the tarmac in DC while crews removed “foreign objects” from the runway–two books that probably deserve reviews, if I ever get back to that side of this blog…)
😀
I’m still not expecting thousands of words of fiction in a writing session at a time anytime soon. This week is finals week, and the week after that I start my first session with TWO classes at a time. But I discovered I have a break from all classes from 6/18 – 7/7, so if I can find similar motivation and scheduling then as I did this past week… maybe I’ll finally be able to finish writing some of the stories that have been on a very slow boil for the past few months.
Sticking with the goals I set last week thus seems reasonable–especially in light of a great commencement speech by Neil Gaiman I was treated to tonight, which concludes with the exhortation to “go, make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. But make good art.” I may be making a mistake by not driving myself toward something more ambitious with my writing schedule, but the same could also be said about not pushing harder to reunite my family, or not finishing the MBA that still has the power to make me curse and feel like my brain is breaking. So I’m choosing to focus on the magical people around me, and trust that that focus will drive my own “good art” in the end.
In the meantime, don’t forget to check out all the other ROW80ers and how they’re doing meeting their goals.
Wow, how did I not know that Neverending Story was a German book. Sheesh, they made us read Sturm und Drang drivelly stuff and the German “classics” at Uni. I might have learned the language faster with fantasy books to read.
I wish you all the best in working through classes and dealing with distance between yourself and your home.
Michael Ende wrote quite a few stories worth studying. While technically classified as children’s literature, he himself said his stories were written for kids aged 8-80, and was upset by how being classified as a children’s author made literary acceptance so much more difficult.