Music from the movie Frozenย is always in my head. The girls want to listen 24/7, and I can’t blame their passion. I can still clearly recall the gusto with which I belted out the soundtrack to Footloose Exhausted was the needle of my record player when I was five and six-years-old.
These songs do make better little girl ballads than Kenny Loggins’ catalog. But on the flip side, earworms are a less pleasurable side effect to the album’s constant rotation. They randomly and unexpectedly burrow into my thoughts throughout the day. Doing dishes, folding laundry, sitting at my computer, I hum the catchy tunes. Soon enough, I find myself musing about how accurate and poignant the message is behind “Love is an Open Door.”
[LOL. I’m sorry, I’ve never rickrolled you before, and I simply couldn’t resist. Here’s the real link.]
True, exhorting the enlightening merits of my children’s music is downright nutty sentimental of me. But you must already know about my sentimentality. If not, allow me to introduce myself: I am a complete and total sap.
But sometimes being sappy gets the job done! I have been a much more productive writer in the past few months, signing up to contribute essays in several places. I am also helping my dad with a project that is teaching me much about the writing craft.
In that vein, here’s a book I recommend:ย “Several short sentences about writing,”ย by Verlyn Klinkenborg. True to its title, it is a collection of short, powerful sentences about writing. Not so much advice as little snippets of truth, this book is what might happen if you turned Jack Handey on his head so he actually made sense.
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| My bed: a favorite place to write. Just me, the cat, and the sun. {and sometimes laundry} {ok, always laundry} |
Earlier this month I submitted an essay for a collection of doula stories. Ever the romantic, I contemplated including John Lennon’s quote about love and fear in my composition. You know the one. It goes like this…
“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
So here’s my sappy conclusion. When we let love drive, it is an open door. We say yes, even when we are afraid. New opportunities pop up. Some might seem too good to be true; I probably don’t need to tell you how those turn out. But all in, life could be a better ride this way.
p.s. Here’s Charlie singing Let it Go, another of the Frozen songs: