April showers bring May flowers, so the saying goes. In other words, endure April for the reward of May. Yet April offers its own bounty: cherry blossoms, swaths of tulips, and the unfurling of maple leaves, to name a few. April also brings those showers, tree pollen, and temperatures often more like winter than spring. April is an energetic month.
Work: I’m drawn to quotes that reframe the challenges of writing and alter my mindset in an expansive and helpful way. For example, here is a recent newsletter quote from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits:
“If you feel resistance before you begin, it’s usually procrastination and you need to get started.
If you feel resistance after you begin, it’s usually feedback and you need to make adjustments.”
These days I do sit down and get started, because I’m eager to write this book about my Armenian family, to watch the shape emerge, morph, fall flat, and rise again. But it’s taken me a while to implement the second part of the quote. I’ll stare at paragraphs that aren’t working, as if time alone will somehow solve the problem. I’ll make line level edits as if tiny alterations can fix larger issues. (Sometimes they can.) But now I’ve realized a larger adjustment is often what is needed.
Sometimes that adjustment is relocation: the scene or section belongs somewhere else in the book. I move it out of the way and the narrative flows again. Sometimes that adjustment is reordering within a section—printing out and cutting that section into paragraphs can help with the reordering. Sometimes that adjustment is a scene compressed into summary or a summary expanded into a scene. Sometimes that adjustment is acknowledging that this particular material doesn’t belong in the book at all.
If you want to understand, and gain strategies to overcome, the role of resistance in your life, I recommend Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a book from which I could pull dozens of expansive and helpful quotes. A book that belongs in every creative person’s library. And we are all creative people.
Do you have a favorite quote that inspires you or reframes an idea or experience?
Wonder: April 24th is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and also my parents’ wedding anniversary. I wonder at their concurrency.
On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested 250 Armenian intellectuals and thus began the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, a genocide that also took the lives of Assyrians, Greeks, and Jews. It wasn’t until 1988 that Armenia, then a republic of the Soviet Union, designated April 24 as a public day of commemoration. The California State Assembly, in 1997, declared April 24 as a Day of Remembrance for the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.
On April 24, 1964, my parents married, picking that date because it fell on a Friday. They married in Las Vegas surrounded by family and friends, and returned to work on Monday.
Really there’s not much here to wonder about. These two anniversaries share a day because coincidences happen. I hadn’t made the connection until recently because the Armenian Genocide wasn’t talked about in my family. We didn’t commemorate the tragic event that my paternal grandmother and her two sisters survived.
This April, my sisters and I, and our families, gathered at my parents’ home to celebrate their 60thwedding anniversary, to celebrate love and family. My parents are together, still here, and Armenians are still here, despite the genocide set in motion on April 24th.
Windows: Two trees in bloom: cherry and dogwood.
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