Dealing in drabbles
Most things really aren’t this big a deal. (Image source)
The lawn did not appear to be fully mown, unless the person who had mowed it intended, as a work of art or landscape design, to leave a rectangular patch of grass to continue to grow.
The lawnmower was nowhere in evidence. The rest of the yard appeared to be tidy.
When I walked by again, tomorrow, next week, or next month, would this patch of taller grass still be there? Would it be mown flat? Or would more of the lawn have become wild?
I walked on, ready to contemplate the mysterious life of another neighbor I'd never know.
***
The piece above is my first attempt to write a drabble, which is a work of fiction that consists of exactly one hundred words. Not counting song lyrics, I hadn’t written any fiction in approximately a million years, so this was interesting and fun to try. Some combination of the precision of the constraints and the scale of the challenge made it irresistibly low-risk.
It’s comforting to be able to define exactly when something is done, and it’s especially pleasant when “done” takes less than ten minutes. Writing this drabble got me thinking: How might I apply this concept to other tasks and projects?
I already practice kaizen in many areas of life. I love to break things down into baby steps, so small that they won’t hurt. I have a few projects that I do in ten-minute increments because otherwise, I wouldn’t do them at all. I learn classical piano pieces one note at a time. But where might I aim not just for small, but precise?
I could:
memorize seven sentences in French or Spanish. Cuando llegué, ya no quedaba pastel.
perform a yoga pose every 40 minutes over the course of my workday.
update four sentences on my website.
record a video of 44 seconds.
text 100 words total, split between three friends I haven’t reached out to in awhile.
write a song that uses six chords.
meditate for 100 seconds.
draw a picture on the back of a business card.
go for a walk of 500 steps (and then 500 steps back).
I could pick one of these metaphorical drabbles and do it every day for thirty days. Then, I’d be building a practice. A playful one that doesn’t trigger anxiety, imposter syndrome, or procrastination.
So many of us have big dreams and goals that we hope to do someday. We can wait years and years before we even take the first step. The whole thing just seems so overwhelming. However, if we make the project smaller, it gets less scary. And if we make it precise like a drabble, we distract ourselves from whether we want to do it or not. Before we know it, we are drawn into the puzzle of how to make it work. Because of the specificity of the constraints, our creativity takes over and we’re on an adventure of possibility.
There are some endeavors that require a leap across a chasm. You can’t take an incremental approach to get to the other side. And yet, if we are willing to try for interesting instead of perfect, real instead of hypothetical, we can find a sneaky way to build new skills that will prepare us for our leap across the chasm—or even an unmarked detour that gets us where we wanted to go. Perhaps a drabble, or something like it, could be just the thing.
Have you ever written a drabble? Can you imagine a drabble-like project that might help you get closer to a goal? Have you ever tried something like this in the past? I would love to hear.
