Trial and error
© Carolyne Weldon
Remember I was telling you about my man Rob Brezsny and his weekly, on-the-money astrological forecasts for Sagittarians? Well I found an ancient specimen of these, last night, cut and pasted into one of my “inspiration” notebooks, next to some embarrassing Deepak Chopra quotes I will not reproduce here. (You should see these books. They really need to burn before I’m dead or senile.)
Reading it, it struck me how Brezsny could just put that single paragraph on repeat and send it to me week after week, until I get it. Very often, catching myself having wandered deep into Craig’s List Missed Connections (a sublime time-waster, for the ethnologically-minded), I wonder what sort of high I am still getting out of my noxious cocktail of procrastination and perfectionism. Why don’t I just write, for crying out loud? But even in the worse of it, I am fully aware the nasty habit will have to go. Even if it takes twelve years, on a smooth leather couch, talking some Jungian psychoanalyst’s ear off about the symbolism of having been denied Fruit Loops as a toddler. It has to go.
Here is Brezsny:
SAGITTARIUS:
“In her book One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher provides excellent advice for people who want to be writers. I’m offering it to you for your all-purpose use as you enter the Reinvent Yourself phase of your astrological cycle. The drive for perfection can be a distraction, Sher says. What’s more useful is to be brave and free enough to experiment with possibilities that may or may not pan out. Don’t think yourself into a corner, agonizing about where to begin. Simply dive in and get to work, trusting that the agitation you churn up will show you what works. Exult in the revelations provided by the trial and error approach! “We learn nothing from our successes,” writes Sher, “which prescribes business as usual. We learn everything from our mistakes, which require us to analyze where we went wrong and invent fresh strategies.”