I hadn’t realized how true Anton Chekhov was when he wrote:
“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
For the past few months now, I am facing a crisis. The problem of the noise that comes from my neighbors’ apartment below. All kinds of noise like loud music or screams and shouts at any time during the day or night. What’s so annoying is the way my floor shakes from their subwoofers.
I have even told my landlady time and time again to ask them to change its location in the house but in vain. I eventually realized that she hasn’t said a word to them. If I want to listen to music I will listen to mine not theirs.
What also makes me angry is that every night I go to bed with all these ideas for stories in my head but come morning I am too tired from sleep deprivation that I can’t write, and I can’t even respond to the comments of fellow bloggers, writers and readers.
Because I spend my time on Google checking houses, neighborhoods and so on. And this bugs me. What I thought was a phase has turned into a day-to-day problem that’s become hard to deal with.
And on most mornings now when I can’t write I read. For an hour or so I read inspirational quotes from other writers to de-stress and forget my problem. Here are some I would like to share with you.
“Write only from experience but you must be one on whom nothing is lost.” Henry James
Dylan Thomas said that he wrote only when he was inspired. But the more he wrote, the inspireder he got.
“Every day I get up and look out the window, and something occurs to me. Something always occurs to me. And if it doesn’t, I just lower my standards.” William Stafford
“In the Eskimo language, the words to breathe and to make a poem are the same. Remembering that has been widely helpful to me. It means a freeness to plunge in, almost like doing a finger painting. It’s a free flow, suspending fact, meaning, sanity, then seeing, in what pours out uncensored, what can be shaped, fashioned, pared down or enlarged to become a poem.” Lyn Lifshin
I wish you all a happy breathing!
ChK
ChichiKir 