Stealing from Other Writers

It’s okay to steal from other writers as long as you do not lift their words exactly as they’ve been written.

What do I mean?

I mean that I intend to look at other blogs and lift my writing topics from them. I also intend to incorporate Anne Lamott’s writing style into my own. Although I don’t know if that’s possible because she’s got a way with words and descriptions that I can only hope to remotely broach. Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird:

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong.

I love that imagery of drop-kicking a puppy. (I like the imagery, not the actual idea of doing it.) That is Anne Lamott style.

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep coming up with different writing topics. There are an infinite number of topics in the world, and the brain is exhaustive. I can only reiterate and spew the same things over and over before even I get sick of my own words.

But I’ll try.

I’m not a how-to person. I’m not one who is a natural instructor. But I’ll see if I can’t come up with at least three lessons learned out of life. I’ll also be borrowing heavily from Michael Hyatt’s website, a prolific blogger whom I admire. While I don’t have any lessons to offer on leadership, I’m sure there’s something I can offer lessons on. Perhaps I need to continue blogging to discover what that is.

What I Learned from My Manicure

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I got a manicure today and as soon as I got home, I ruined some of it (as you can see by the thumb). The nail polish wasn’t mine so I can’t fix it. But what I can do is learn three things from my manicure:

1. People aren’t perfect. The lady cutting my cuticles left a glaring one hanging that I cut myself when I got home. But I can’t expect her to be perfect and see every detail, just as I can’t expect myself to be perfect and catch every detail.

2. Life is messy. My nails aren’t quite what I would like them to be. Just like life. You think you’ve got things all figured out and suddenly life puts a huge dent in your flawless manicure. Life won’t turn out how you expect it to.

3. All things will pass. My manicure won’t last forever and crappy things don’t last forever. In a week, I will not care about the smudge on my thumb because it will not be there. Most troubles will come and go; what will remain are the lessons we’ve learned.

A bonus: most things are fine. Most of my nails look great. Those are the ones I can show off. Most things in life tend to be fine. It’s just the glaring, obvious problems that tend to get our attention. But when you consider everything that’s going on in your life, most things are going well (especially if you have the ability to read this).

Can you name one thing going well in your life in spite of feeling like things are going wrong?