Michael’s new groove
In the 2000 Disney animated film, The Emperors New Groove, there is a scene where the llama herder, Pacha, finds an old man who was tossed out of the palace by Kuzco, the emperor. Asked why this happened, the old man says, “I threw off the Emperor’s groove.” So Pacha asks the inevitable, “What?” To which the old man replies, “His groove! The rhythm in which he lives his life. His pattern of behavior. I threw it off.”
I have thought a lot about that in the past year and have slowly come to realize that my groove was thrown off in January of 2014 and I am still trying to recover from it. Most people live by a rhythm in their lives and when it is disrupted it can have severe consequences. My old groove revolved around my job. Get up, shower, dress, eat, drive, work, come home, eat, sleep. In retrospect it seems a fairly grim life, though most humans on earth do this on a daily basis. As part of my daily groove I would spend my lunch hour occasionally working on bits and pieces of personal art projects and more generally, I would write my novels. You could wonder if I ever got anything done this way, but over a long period of time I accomplished an enormous number of things. In the last six years alone I finished up many art projects and 3 and a quarter, quite lengthy novels. When I lost my job, I lost my groove, my rhythm. I stopped writing, I haven’t written a new thing in the past year. This is rather disturbing as I was learning much about writing just by doing it almost every day. I did spend quite a bit of time editing and doing a little rewrite on my first novel recently to prepare it for publication, but still, I did nothing new in the entire past year. So finding myself back to start, that is, in a new January in a new year, I am very much alarmed. (I desperately want to find out what happens in the 4th book.) To be fair, the previous year did consist of a lot of experimental trial and error, attempting to re-establish a rhythm, but nothing solid was ever accomplished. Now that severance pay, unemployment insurance, bits and pieces of retirement funding, freelance and whatnot are dispensed with, I think I can settle down to a new pattern and it must include writing, I have missed it very much. Somewhere in there I should also include time for painting, another thing that is very much a part of me. But I really must get the writing back on track, back in the groove, I hate being thrown off by things. Creative people must create, it keeps them whole, so they create, if not, they will just fall apart.
