40 days to go...

"Your attitude determines your altitude", I read today in Maxwell’s Your Roadmap for Success Workbook. He was referring to JFK’s historic commitment in 1961 to put a man on the moon before the end of that decade. Attitude, he said, made it possible, "the power of a dream coupled with the right attitude."

He went on to say that a "a dream without a positive attitude produces a daydreamer", and that "a positive attitude without a dream produces a pleasant person who can’t progress.” I couldn’t disagree with Maxwell on this, and I echoed after him that "having a good attitude makes all the difference in the world."

So there I was, in mid morning on Sunday having read these high-powered words, and what to do next? It didn't take me long to figure that out. I knew what I had to do, and did it. I spent the whole day working at home on my research, engrossed in adding and revising. A positive attitude got me going, and kept me at it.

I realized that some self-help books like Maxwell’s offer me a good opportunity to move forward, that is, if I don’t stop at reading them but actually apply their wisdom, at least the ones I agree with.

In between work, I sorted out notes I had written over the past two years in my PDA and had transferred to MS Outlook in my PC. And I was surprised at the number of poems I had written, and forgotten about. A nice rediscovery. I will pick some to post in my Poetry Me blog.

Because I spent all day working at my desk at home, I could not help feeling a physical disconnection from the world, friends, other people. Although, nowadays the flow of SMS rarely stops, and that helped me today to keep reaching out. I’m lucky to have friends who stay in touch and appreciate it when I reach out too.

Yesterday I had two thoughts about being alone. First, that it’s a natural and necessary thing to happen to people who write. But since I started writing I have not really felt lonely when I am alone. In times of solitude, I found that I can connect with the world and express my creativity through my writing.

And I am not alone in such experience. A friend whom I admire spends much of the time alone in writing and creating art. Another friend wrote today that she found pleasure in enjoying a windy beach in Boracay by herself, before attending a wedding party there.

But of course, every experience has its limits, and being physically connected to others is both healthy and necessary. So my second thought was that writers need to be part of the action. I got this idea from reading a story in Newsweek about Buenos Aires having become a hub for writers, artists, and musicians, referred to as the Capital of Cool. So I take it that writers do tend to converge to places where there is something going on.

Paulo Coelho wrote in Like a Flowing River that he has three different kinds of times in his life, akin to three distinct movements in a symphony. He calls them times of “a lot of people”, “a few people”, and “almost no one”. I assume he replays these movements over and over again, like I do when I enjoy a particular piece of music.

I took inspiration from this and I’ve now adapted my attitude to enjoy solitude when it meets me. And also to plunge into the action when the other two times come my way, with a few or a lot of people. These past days I was cocooned in “almost one one” time.

Photographs: (Top) Hue of the City, by a painter from Ubud, a place I miss. (Bottom) Writing alone, at the foot of the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan, Mexico, one of the many enjoyable experiences I had in 2006.