On the advice of a good friend, I finally went to the doctor yesterday and got diagnosed with bronchitis. Having had a few bouts of pneumonia as a child, I decided to go the regular medical route to healing before it settled deeper in my chest.
And so here I am in the middle of the night, revived and running on the high-octane of drugs, making a note to go to Whole Foods and get some probiotics when they open.
Driving back from my morning coke run, listening as always to NPR, I noticed that our cold front had arrived, 48 degrees, heading toward 38. The Honda was blowing a bit in the wind. The window people at McDonalds who often give me my cokes for free threw in a sausage biscuit this morning.
On Morning Edition there was an interesting story: People regard creativity more highly if it comes from far away. If you want to pitch an idea, we were advised, don't pitch it where you live.
Why? Apparently, when we're close up to something (or someone) we see the details; when we're far away, we see it in a more abstract way. We tend to be more critical of those right in front of us, in awe of people and ideas that are geographically distant.
I often think--as I'm sitting across the table at Adalantes talking and reading with a writer friend, or as I'm sitting in my wonderful writing groups: This piece is better than much of published writing I've read lately. This piece is vibrant, provocative, unusual--something the world should get to read!
But here we are, all close up to each other and far from Publication Central in New York. Few of us attempt to publish in that far away world we know little about, perhaps intimidated by the roads we'd have to learn to navigate to take our writing out there into the world.
Our hesitancy to publish may mean a loss to the larger world out there, but the writing is a boon to those of us in the close-up audience who meet to savor and appreciate what our writer friends can do. I carry their poems and stories around with me everywhere I go, my treasured companions.
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