50/50 Exercise #15: Book That Changed Your Life

Author’s note

This piece is so far from being complete that I thought it might clarify matters for my readers if I put my note at the start instead of at the end, which is where I usually have been placing notes about the texts.

The assignment was to write about a book that’s had a big influence on me. I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly why this has been the hardest exercise for me since the 50/50 class started. I love books—lots of them! I could name many books that have had a profound impact: The Chronicles of Narnia, any Ray Bradbury short-story collection, The House of the Spirits, Illusions, Walden, A Christmas Carol, Welcome to the Monkey House…the list goes on and on and on. But I settled on One Continuous Mistake a few moments after receiving the assignment, and I’ve been chipping away for days at trying to put into words why it’s had such a significant effect. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that I’m still trying to digest its lessons.

In the interest of getting back on pace with the class assignments, I’m going to call it quits, set this exercise aside for now, and return to it later. The following bits and piece are what I’ve assembled so far for a consideration of the book’s influence on me.

• Writers write.
• Writing is a process.
• You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process.
• If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.

When my friend, coach, and mentor Chris Welsh mentioned the subtitle of One Continuous Mistake to me on the phone one day last spring, my flippant remark was, “Tell me the four noble truths, and maybe I don’t need to read the book.” He read the four truths to me from the book jacket, and the minute I hung up the phone, I tracked down the book in the Houston Public Library catalog and requested that one of their three copies be shipped to the Heights branch.

I have to back up.

Long before I read this book, I spent a lot of years calling myself an “aspiring writer.” I used to visit a psychotherapist who spent years asking me how my writing was going, and my answer was usually a shrug and a change of subject. Even with his very capable counseling, I couldn’t reconcile the feeling that I ought to be a writer with the fact that I wasn’t doing much writing. For a while, I resisted his efforts to talk about the topic at all.

Here is where I need to talk at length about developing an every-day exercise routine, how my walking regimen started producing results and became an irresistible habit/obsession/compulsion, taking the first steps toward writing on a regular basis, the advances I made when I took Chris Welsh’s Mastery of Learning program, and where I found myself in life at the moment I encountered this book.

One Continuous Mistake helped me make sense of some things that I was trying to work out on my own. It offered a plausible explanation of the connection I kept making in my mind between walking and writing. It helped me recognize that my walking routine was a Zen practice—an exercise in which “success” is manifested in merely showing up—and it helped me get comfortable thinking of my daily writing habit as a Zen practice as well.

It made a huge difference for me to realize that if I just sit down and write for a half hour or so every day without regard for quality, with no objective, no focus on results, no attention even to coherence, I have still accomplished something. And after I’d gotten myself to that point, something started to thaw in my resistance to thinking of myself as a writer.

One day I was at a workshop, and we were going around the room taking turns talking about what we’d been reading and writing. I said (among other things), “I write just about every day,” and I saw a look of admiration in a few of my fellow writers’ eyes. Later that day, after one of the rounds of reading our class work aloud, I realized that somewhere in the previous year or two of Zen-practice daily writing exercises, something had changed for the better in my writing. In all that stream-of-consciousness scribbling, I had drained off a lot of my pretensions, left behind some of my attitudes about what a writer’s voice should sound like, and reach something simpler and more genuinely my voice.