A Reaction to Senior Project

Part of my senior project involves writing this very in-the moment, peek-into-my-mind "poetry". The reason I put quotation marks around the word poetry is that I'm not writing poems with rhyming patterns, or alliteration or any other sort of classical poetic form you might expect. What I'm writing is very free-form and very modern. For example, one that I wrote at the very beginning of this process goes like this:

the problem 

isn’t that people don’t want to do what is right

it’s that they can’t understand

when someone disagrees with them about

what is right

I think you get the idea.

Anyways, what I want to write about here is my experience with writing these short little bursts of lucidity.

When I started this, the idea I had in my head was that I was going to write a single one every day. Unfortunately, it hasn't quite worked out that well. Often, what will happen is that I won't write one for several days, then I'll find some time and write 3 or 4 in a row. While not quite what I had intended, I sort of like this arrangement. What I think it shows is that I tend to reflect on longer periods of time than just a day. I would like to try at some point to do it every day at a set time, just to see if I'm able to force myself to reflect that consistently.

As you can probably tell, reflection does seem to be the big thing here. Ultimately, that's what this experiment is forcing me to do. What's good about that is that reflection is something that's come somewhat naturally to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's really the best way to learn, not just about yourself, but about how to interact with the world around you. What has been harder about this is taking that internal reflection and creating an external manifestation of it. I've never considered myself the most creative person, so creating something that could be loosely considered art is very new to me. 

That struggle has definitely been beneficial though. I've sort of gotten back into the creative writing process and am taking another stab at writing lyrics, something I tried (with generally pretty bad results) about two years ago. What's awesome about that is that the band I'm in is really interested in writing original songs, and one thing we've always struggled with is writing lyrics. If I'm able to write something that I'm proud enough of to put out in a song, that would be amazing. 

Ultimately, I am really glad I made this choice for my senior project. It's an incredibly enjoyable activity and I cannot wait to write about it further.