Do you sit to write?
Usually, people do. We can write while walking or standing, but day in and day out, there is a lot of sitting. So you need a good chair.
Writing can be hard physical work. Not only are you typing away for many hours, which is potentially very hard on your hands, but you are sitting in a chair for hour after hour. Ideally, you should take a break every 45 minutes or so, but in practice, writing is often so hard that you just keep going once you get in motion. And when deadlines happen – forget about being healthy. You just want to get that piece of work done. The hours can be grueling because it can take years of research to get ready to write, then you basically want to write every waking moment until you get it done, which means months of long days.
I just wrote a piece for this site about my lineage, the tradition of meditation teachers who are my mentors, and how I came to study with them. It's about 14,000 words as of today, August 22. I probably worked on it for 14 hours over a three-day period, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. People were coming and going through the living room as I worked away. Camille left the house at noon on Saturday, and I was just starting to write it. She came back at 11 p.m., along with two friends of ours from out of town who were taking the workshop and sleeping on the floor of the living room. I was still sitting there working on it. I had gone to the gym, jumped in the ocean, came back, made dinner, and then resumed work. I went to bed at midnight, then woke up before dawn with ideas zooming through my head, and worked all morning into the afternoon. Our friends awoke to see me writing on Sunday morning, and I chatted with them a bit and kept on writing. They went off to the workshop, and Camille came home at 11 pm Sunday night and I was still there. In spite of the long hours, my hands were not sore at all, my back was not stiff, my shoulders were relaxed, and my eyes were not tired.
This morning our friend awoke to me writing, and Courtney started remarking on how relaxed I was and had been all weekend. It was impossible to distract me – I would just say hello, get up and dance with them, then return to writing. My focus was so easy that I could attend to the other people then zoom in on the writing process, and they felt that they were adding to my writing, not distracting me.
Courtney asked, "How do you do that?"
The answer is many things.
Coco herself and Rob.
Writing Tools
Let's talk about the hardware first, then the meditation skills that let me stay happy as a musician at play as I sit here writing.
The Chair
First of all, I have one of world's great chairs, the Haider Bioswing. The whole chair is mounted on springs, so you are always moving. Unfortunately, the chair does not seem to be available in the United States, only in Europe
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The chair is so supple that it is like dancing, to sit in it. I can easily be doing subtle undulations of my spine, staying in motion, so that I don't get tired from sitting.