Compartmentalizing Life II

Where compartmentalizing my life is particularly useful is with certain kinds of creative work. I realize I use it in many places (family, health, relationships, farm, personal issues, obligations, etc. etc.) but creativity and political awareness are two which illustrate what I mean about it probably best.

I do not spend my life ranting or thinking about politics even though I do write a political blog, Rainy Day Things, where I cover whatever strikes me on the latest issues. I do read a lot about what is going on culturally and politically. Sure, I get  mad over this or that, but overall, it's in a compartment that I can leave behind.

So when I read about how deceptive, almost Machiavellian (except it's not clever enough to qualify for that) Newt Gingrich has been about accepting money from the very group he's busy slamming elsewhere, I am more amazed that anybody says they'd vote for him. Seriously, the Republicans want this guy, who has lived very comfortably with being a hypocrite? What the heck is that all about for the voters?

Having grandchildren in schools, it gets me when Gingrich wants to change the work laws to allow the poorest of the poor 9-year olds to serve as janitors in schools to teach them work ethics as though no rich children ever have a problem with work ethics. When do the 9-year olds do their homework, oh never mind.

Or the Occupy movement which, sympathetic though I have been to the problem, has had a title that irked me from the start. Occupy, doesn't that mean take? What are they planning to take and who is going to do the taking? I just read something from the guy who claims credit for the term Occupy as to what he wants from it. Kalle Lasn-- The branding of the occupy movement. Now I understand that many in the Occupy movement don't want to claim anybody speaks for them, he said what his goal is-- “somehow change the power balance and make the world into a much more grass-roots, bottom-up kind of a place rather than the top-down Wall Street mega-corporate-driven system we now have.”  That doesn't ring right with me, sounds impractical, and a lot like communism that has failed everywhere it's been tried, but...

I could go nuts thinking about any of this if I went too far with it. So I debate with myself whether I want to write about it. I don't stay in a rage over it-- even though some clearly think I should. I think what I can do; and if the answer is nothing, I put it aside for sometime in the future when there will be something. The ideas and thoughts don't go away, but they are pushed into their own compartment for access when needed but to avoid being so emotionally swamped that I'd lose my ability to function on anything else. It would be easy to have that happen today, to even convince ourselves that our rage was doing something, but I don't believe that it does. It's just unhealthy.

Some of what I think has let me do this, not have to fear learning about these controversial issues, reading both sides of an issue, and avoiding being swallowed by them, is my creative side which has always been important to me, whether it was sculpture, painting, writing, or something else.

I go to the creative work and totally leave behind that compartment of political angst; but the creative work doesn't swallow me either.  It's another compartment that I can set aside when an emergency arises, someone needs me. or I need to move out of it which might even be visiting with someone who has zero interest in what I am researching or writing.

Right now I am involved in putting together a new manuscript, something I haven't done for eight or more years. Because it's a romance but based in a real historic period, it has involved researching Oregon in 1865-66. Even there, I compartmentalize. I want to know what happened in a certain geographic zone and that historic point in time which means I don't read about more than that-- unless I need to know a motivation that requires knowing. I am not easily distracted and with researching history boy would that be easy to have happen. I focus on what influenced my characters and stick to it.

Working on this new story has been a prime example of the compartmentalizing as I didn't start writing as my first ideas began to gel. I mentally created characters and events while doing that research mentioned above. It was rather a fun time as I could create a character, take them quite a ways into the story, decide they don't work and literally erase their existence without having written a word down anywhere.

Sometimes my compartmentalizing is quite handy as it means I can go off and spend time with the family, be gone from a creative project for days, let other problems enter my head like how are the grandchildren doing and do I have any ideas from my past that might help with their current problems and all the while the story I had had being everything is seemingly gone except it isn't. It's waiting in that compartment.

There are distractions to this tidy arrangement-- those mentioned emergencies... or something outside my world that enters and doesn't fit in any compartment. I put that under the category of flexibility. That could be the music from Oklahoma, which I watched again recently, and the songs keep popping up in the middle of other things. And worse-- drat, not even my favorite song Oklahoma but one or more of the others, one of the more sticky ones, and it just won't leave me alone. The same thing can happen with a movie where a scene is coming back again and again and has zero to do with my own projects or compartments. It doesn't fit and manages to move through them all.

Oklahoma where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain...