(whoops, internet didn’t publish this yesterday! Enjoy double blogs today).
I heard a story about the composer of West Side Story on the Dare to Lead podcast yesterday. Charles Duhigg was the guest, the author of The Power of Habit (which I read a couple of years ago) and Smarter, Faster, Better (new, not read yet). He talked about Leonard Bernstein who created a habit to think deeply every day.
Leonard was a very curious human, Duhigg recounted. “He’d go to these Jitterbug contests all over New York City, every night. He’d go to these meetings of the Communist party, not because he was a communist, he just liked it when people yelled at each other. He was openly bisexual when homosexuality was illegal. He would read these dime-store novels, but also Shakespeare.”
But then every night Leonard would go home and write a 10 to 15-page letter to a friend.
“And the letters are terrible, the letters are so boring,” Duhigg says. “He would send them to his friends and his friends would write back and say, ‘I read the first couple of pages and then just stopped reading, because it’s just drivel.’
“But he wasn’t writing them for his friends, he was writing them for himself, because by forcing himself to write what he had done that day and what he thought about it, he was seeing the connection between a Jitterbug contest and a Salsa concert he had gone to, and this latest version of Romeo and Juliet analysis that he had read. That’s where West Side Story comes from, is him writing these letters and seeing these connections between ideas.
“He had gotten into the habit of doing it every single night . . . he had a cognitive routine that forced him to think about what he had seen that day, and make connections.”
Hearing this made me think about what I do hear. My ambition for writing every day isn’t to improve SEO and get more views and sell advertisements (I have literally never looked at SEO for this blog). Writing on this platform started as a way to tap into my creative muscles again and became a habit. It forces me to think every day and oftentimes, yeah, “it’s just drivel”. Or a silly haiku. Or reflecting on a podcast I listened to while cleaning the bathrooms. But all of it together has helped me think deeply, if only for a few minutes, about what I want to say today.
When I wrote my reflection on a year in Door County, I actually felt something in my mental health shift for the better. Taking that time for gratitude and to think intentionally about the year and my place in time helped me get out of my head. So while it’s nice to think about people enjoying my words, and a nice way to keep the people closest to me connected to my life, this will always benefit me the most.
I recommend giving the episode a listen and picking up one of Charles Duhigg’s books.
With Love,
Natalie