Writing – Serenity Through Sweat

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog.

This week is a little different. It is more of a writing exercise than an informative post.

While spending a lot of time in the car with the little ones, I had to switch up my Pandora radio stations a little bit.

Tacos after Speedy came with me to Jui Jitsu

At 5 and 3, El Duderino and Speedy will soon be ready for the gospel of Wu Tang, and the back country twang and blues of Tyler Childers. But, for now, those are lessons best saved for another day.

So, as I found some more age appropriate jams that were still in my wheelhouse I stumbled across this song from Ed Sheeran.

Here is a link to the YouTube video, as it is worth a listen before you continue on with the rest of the post.

I really love the way Sheeran communicates his story with incomplete sentences. Two word snippets that paint an incredibly vivid picture. All done in a rhythmic and rhyming prose that suits his strumming and falsetto.

The words and the melody make you feel something. That is incredibly powerful, and only compounded by the fact that it is done with such an economy of words.

It seemed like a fun idea. Can you distill your feelings and a story into small two word snippets? Make them fit into Ed’s style of prosidy? I thought I would give it a try.

Below are two verses of my A-team rendition. One verse about flying and one about triathlon.

Hotels, new place, dont forget a brave face, try to sleep, and re trace.

Find food, work out, kids at home to think about, rain storms, self doubt.

And they say, he’s a little bit crazy. Stuck in his daydream, been this way since eighteen, but lately. His patience, is slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries, and they scream, the best things in life come free to us.

Cause we’re just under the management, and go mad just to pay the rent. We don’t wanna be away from home tonight. But we love the way that we pay the bills, and can’t easily transfer our skills. It’s a tightrope walk each night, for all those that fly.

Legs burn, dry throat, another lap to stay afloat, wheels turn, bike home

Run some, feet sore, training can feel like a chore, calm mind, worth more.

And they say he’s a little bit crazy, stuck in his daydream, been this way since eighteen, but lately, his patience is slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries, and they scream, the best things in life come free to us.

Cause we’re just under the training plan, no matter how much we already ran, and we just want to rest tonight. And in the morning we ride to another jam, transport to another land. Mental clarity is worth the price, for a few more miles tonight.

I had a lot of fun with this post. Trying to find the words and the rhyming pattern for complex thoughts was an interesting exercise. Parsing them down into two word snippets forces you to assign value to your thoughts.

What is most important to you? How do you convey that to the reader in two word snippets? Does the whole say more than the sum of the parts?

Economy and value are often at odds with each other. If you are forced to truncate your ideas, the quality of the message can suffer. But, when it doesn’t, it feels like that much more significant of an accomplishment in communication.