Tag: hard work

Get Up and Go (A Gramble About Gumption)

Pavowski12 Comments

By the way, “Gramble” is just a word I made up. I wanted to keep alliterating with “G”s so I stuck one on the front of “ramble”. Don’t be afraid of my Frankenstein’s monster of a word. Its literary thirst for blood can only be satiated with ink.

Anyway. Gumption. Where does it go?

Some days the gumption is there; it burns away in your belly, it secretes its smoky certainty through your pores and fills you to the tippy top with vigor and optimism. Other days, the fire goes out, and all that’s left is the ashy residue of a bonfire, some empty beer bottles, and a few condom wrappers from where all the cool couples disappeared into the woods.

“Gumption” itself is one of those outdated words that you don’t hear much anymore, but there’s no word quite like it. We’ve got the newfangled Play-Doh lump of a word, “sticktoitiveness”, which is not so much a word as a philosophy. There’s “tenacity”, which has something to do with gumption, but isn’t the same thing. Then you can go and get all negatively-connotated and toss out “stubborn”, which, again, rubs up against gumption but doesn’t take the prize turkey home.

“Gumption” is homey and colloquial and down-to-earth. It’s a don’t-give-up mentality that somehow runs the gamut between boundless optimism and pigheaded refusal to back down. It’s a quiet, determined certainty that with hard work, anything can be achieved.

Maybe it’s one of those things that’s impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.

Gumption is a concept that has resonated with me since I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. I first read it in my senior year of high school, then again in my sophomore year at college, then again in my fourth year of college, then again shortly after graduating college, then again after I graduated college again, and it’s recently been in my brain that maybe I ought to read it again. It’s a fascinating little book that’s not actually very much about Zen or motorcycle maintenance, but rather about the world at large and how you choose to view it. If you’re philosophically inclined at all, you’ll probably get some mileage out of it. One of its defining moments for me is a scene wherein the protagonist fixes his buddy’s misfiring motorcycle with an old beer can. The protagonist is pleased with his ingenuity; the buddy is flustered and ultimately unable to live with the notion that a piece of trash could fix everything that’s wrong with his bike. He’s too caught up in the idea of what the bike should look like and what fixing it should entail to realize that the chemically-treated, rust-proof surface on the inside of the can provides all the fixing his bike could ever want at a fraction of the cost and time needed for a “proper” fix.

Anyway, I love the idea of gumption — that inevitable, inescapable quality within the self that just knows how to buckle down and get sharknado done — but I’m faced with a terrible truth lately. Mine is gone.

Like, a few months ago, I had it. I knew right where it was. In the left lobe of my brain, next to the wrenches and the repository of dangling participles. But now it’s gone. Misplaced? Stolen? Dried up?

I’m reminded of an Aerosmith lyric: “My get-up-and-go must have got up and went.”

Seriously. I’m behind on the novel. I wanted to finish the first edit by the end of January, and now it’s trailing off into March and I’m always “just a few weeks away.” I’m behind on grading papers at work and have been since… well… January. Even my posts on the blarg have been fewer and farther between since… ahem… January.

What happened in January?

I have no idea, but whatever it was ran my gumption right out of town. But, see, that doesn’t make sense. Because gumption is a part of who you are. Right? It can no more leave you than your wits, or your good looks, or… maybe these are bad examples.

The point is, my gumption is missing lately. If you’ve seen it, please tell it I would very much appreciate it if it would return home. I have a lot of work to get done. And a lot of get-ups that need to get going.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

CommiTTmenT (You Don’t Need New Year’s Resolutions)

Pavowski18 Comments

A few days ago, I posted a roundabout look at New Year’s Resolutions and my general disdain for them. And freely I own that I’m a cynic and a Grinch about lots and lots of things. But I don’t think I’m wrong. Most New Year’s Resolutions fail, right? I mean, you apparently need look no further than any gym. Gyms sell enough memberships in January to keep them in the black for the entire year. Regular gym-goers spend January and February griping about the resolution-makers that clog up the gyms during those months. They go and buy their memberships filled with purpose and zeal. They arrive at the gym without a real plan and mill about, hopping on a treadmill here, a bench-press machine there, and then they go home, feeling good about themselves for getting out of the house. I’ve read ridiculous stories in the last couple of days about sign-up lists of over an hour to get on a treadmill. An HOUR! (Protip: run outside and feel less like a rat on a wheel!)

Of course, by the time March comes around and the realization has dawned that it’s hard making time to go to the gym regularly, and that it takes work and discomfort to make the change they want in their bodies, the herd thins out. Why? I think there are two factors at work.

First is societal pressure. At the New Year, everybody is making resolutions to change his or her life for the better. “New Year, New Me!” And they promise to lose weight, cut back on vices, start working out, save more money, be a better person, and on and on ad nauseam. Problem is, they’re making these resolutions because they’re supposed to. It’s that time of year, after all, and people are going to be asking what your New Year’s resolutions are, and you want to have something good on your ledger. Which is one of the worst reasons to make a decision about changing your life, not to mention, it doesn’t work.

The reason it doesn’t work is the second factor: commitment. Or rather, a lack of it. If you want to make a change in your life, it takes time, and thought, and hard work, and a hell of a lot of sticktoitiveness. You know, “commitment.” The average New Year’s Resolution is made in a haze of misery about the state of a life lived over the previous year. It’s a lament after looking at oneself in the (literal or metaphorical) mirror. It’s born of frustration and disbelief (how did I let things get this way?) because it is based in the moment. But in the self-centered, instantaneous-feedback world of iPads and Twitter and name-your-app-or-device-that-has-I-or-me-or-my in its title, it’s hard for us to think outside of the moment.

Unfortunately, change doesn’t happen in the moment. I look in the mirror and recognize that I didn’t go overnight from 175 pounds up to almost 200. It’s easy to think that the change was sudden, but no, the fact is I worked hard at making myself that way by not fighting against my own momentum for about a year. I’d have to be an idiot to think I could decide on Jan. 1 to lose weight and start turning it around right away. Except that’s exactly what happens. People buy their gym memberships, go dutifully for a few weeks, don’t see the type of radical change they’re looking for and/or expecting IMMEDIATELY, think “fargo it”, and go back to the couch. People decide they’re going to write, and they do so religiously for a few weeks, but then it dawns on them that it’s actually work to write and it takes away time from other things they’d rather do, and it’s over. If you look around, you can find scads of blogs with twenty or fewer posts. They create the blargs, full of that mystical swill that makes us want to share and tell stories and paint pictures with words, and then slowly the gumption peters out and the blargs fall discarded like so many chewed-up tires by the roadside. (I’m painfully aware of this, because the title I wanted for this blog is in use by a woman who created a blog to talk about her pregnancy and wrote all of 2 POSTS back in 2011. Fargo!)

No, change takes commitment. It takes a good, long, hard look at the self — and not just the self we see, but the self we are: the love handles and the laziness and the fact that we can’t climb a flight of stairs without breaking a sweat and the fact that it’s so much easier and more inviting to watch hours of Reality TV reruns than it is to pick up the pen (virtual or otherwise) and create something. It takes a plan of action, not just jumping into the deep end of the pool and hoping for the best. It takes patience and an acknowledgment that it takes time to change your momentum: every step you take toward a new self is a step twice as hard, because you’re fighting against the current of your own bad decisions. The good news is, each step unburdens you just a little bit as you drop the bad momentum and build good momentum. It’s slow going, is all, and it takes commitment to weather the storm.

The point is, you don’t need New Year’s to make a change in your life. Or maybe you do. Ultimately it doesn’t matter when you make the change, the important thing is that you make the change. But don’t make it because you have a glass of champagne in your hands and the balls are dropping.

What’s that? Oh. Ball. The ball (singular) is dropping. Don’t make a change because it’s the time for making changes. Make the change because it’s time for the change to be made, and commit to the work that the change requires.

Happy New Year.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.