Flash fiction from prompt

Place: A newsroom

Actor: An innocent bystander

Object: A purple umbrella

Mood: Tense

Rapid keystrokes mixed with subdued murmurs while most eyes were glued to monitors filled with hoped-for headline stories.  Occasional furtive glances were cast toward the editor’s office.

Bobby, the mailroom clerk, skipped his usual banter with the reporters as he delivered beige window envelopes to the three senior reporters. As he pushed  his cart into the elevator, all murmurs ceased.  Dale slid his envelope under the keyboard then chugged down the rest of his cold coffee.  Jake stroked his silver beard and drummed his fingers rapidly on the envelope.  

Kayla slid her envelope into her grey suit pocket. With neither a word or glance directed to her colleagues, she picked up her purple handbag and matching umbrella and strode out of the room.  In the silence, all the reporters listened as her heels clattered down the stairs.  Instead of gradually fading, the sound came to an abrupt halt.  

After a few minutes, Matthew, the Graphic Artist glared at the heads bent over their laptops, slammed down his coffee and bolted down the stairs.  The handbag, still snapped shut and the matching purple umbrella rested casually in the corner of the landing. The grey blazer cut in even strips were laid neatly over the fully open umbrella.  Of Kayla, there was no sign.

Character sketch - Kayla

Character Sketch

Kayla would die of embarrassment if anyone caught her reading an issue from her enormous  stash of Superman comics, some of them published in the early 60s.  It’s definitely not 26-year-old reading material.  No way would she admit even to her cat, if she still had one,  that Lois Lane was her idol or that her own Superman was a frequent fantasy.

She would be somewhat redeemed if that person browsed through her bookshelf and noticed a few classics by Dickens, a complete collection of Arthur Conan Doyle novels and the textbooks from her journalism courses.  She could recite the titles, plots, setting and characters from every Sherlock Holms story Doyle ever wrote. Her phenomenal memory, attention to detail, curiosity, discipline and determination brought her to the top of her graduating class.  Three years after landing her first newsroom job, she was the senior journalist; the editor assigned to her the highest profile stories.

When she started martial arts training a year ago, she replaced cigarettes with black Twizzlers that she cut in half and kept in a mug on her desk both at home and in the newsroom.  The indigo cup at home sported the caption: “As I suspected, I was right all along”.   The violet one at work was unadorned.  She flirted with a vegetarian diet but refused to go vegan; giving up key lime Greek yogurt was not an option.

With no siblings or extended family, she was close to her mom who lived in Cowichan Bay where she was raised.  Her mom remained a committed Christian; Kayla was committed only to finding the truth in every case she wrote headlines for; she leaned more toward Buddhism than to the useless, heartless God who let her dad die of cancer when she was 10 despite her daily fervent prayers for his healing.  She kept to a rather austere lifestyle which enabled her to send a generous monthly stipend to her mom every month.

Though she refrained from even the slightest degree of intimacy with people, she was extremely sensitive and intuitive to their emotions, tone of voice and gestures.  She could detect deception and often discerned people’s motives more clearly than they did themselves; she could have excelled as either a gambler or diplomat since none of her own thoughts or emotions could be discerned by others.

Her thick wavy auburn hair was woven in a french braid for the newsroom and for workouts and bound in a ponytail swaying between her shoulder blades when chilling at home.  In memory of her dad, she always wore something purple; for work she wore purple suede boots, either a black or grey calf-length slit skirt and a tweed blazer. Her blouses were the same style, buttoned to the neck in white or black. She carried a lilac purse and matching umbrella; you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of days with no sudden rain in Vancouver.  The unpredictable showers annoyed her; millenials  strolling the busy downtown sidewalks with their eyes glued to their cellphones and jostling those in their path strongly tempted her to deal karate chops to their wrists.

At 5’3’ with a muscular build and cool demeanor Kayla exuded a no-nonsense attitude, occasionally relieved by humorous one-liners that seemed especially amusing, being completely unexpected.  Though liked and respected by her colleagues, none of them considered themselves her friends; only Matthew, the graphic artist made any effort to bring their relationship beyond the newsroom. She thwarted his efforts with smiles and evasive answers.

My alternative to resolutions

For the last 45 years, I’ve had this practice that I would do, usually on December 31st, or during the days following Christmas.  I started this when I was in my mid-teens. Even then, I had this drive to improve myself in some way. Usually, what I wanted most was to eliminate an undesirable habit.  As I grew older, these desires included developing new habits, achieving a specific goal, completing some project or gaining a new skill. What has changed in the past decade isn’t so much the thing I want to change, gain or achieve; it is the way I speak to myself about it.

I’ve learned through painful and repeated experience what does not work.  I would say to myself: “You will do “x” every day.” Implicit in this was the castigation I would heap on myself the first day that I neglected or forgot to do “x”.  No matter how determined and committed I thought I was to do “x” each day, inevitably the day would come when I didn’t for any number of reasons. The result was an ever-decreasing self-confidence and an ever-deteriorating sense of self-worth.  I realized that it made no sense to repeat this process that, not only failed to build the habit of doing “x” every day, but was causing me harm and making it highly unlikely that I would end up doing “x” with any regularity.

The significant change I made in this past decade concerns the language I engage in when I talk to myself about things I want to start or to stop doing.  I used to say things like: “I will floss every day.” On the first day I neglected to floss, I would say something harsh to myself and abandon any effort to build a habit of flossing—at least until my next dental appointment!

Using this habit of daily flossing as an example, I now would say to myself something like: “It would be a good idea to floss every night while you soak your feet while listening to a podcast or to an audiobook just before bed.”  (Since I am already soaking my feet every night before bed while reading, it wouldn’t take much effort to switch the paperback or ebook for the podcast or audiobook.) I would then say: “Since we know that it’s easy to forget to floss a day here or there, let’s aim for 4 to 5 days each week.  Even if you don’t floss for a week, that’s OK. Just do it tonight. One day at a time. Just don’t quit altogether and this will work for us.”

For a habit that I want to start, I take the following approach:

• I give myself specific reasons to do it that emphasize the positive results if I follow through and the negative results if I make no effort at all.
• I allow myself some flexibility as to when or how often I’ll engage in the new behaviour. 
• I remind myself that it’s OK to slip up as long as I begin again at the first opportunity and refrain from any self-criticism.
• I join it to other habits to the extent this is possible.

It is so easy to fall into the trap of using an “all at once” approach when we feel the need for self-improvement, especially when we’ve hit some kind of bottom in our lives.  Because we’re suffering from the consequences of one or more negative habits, we want to change as much as possible as quickly as possible. Our culture strongly influences us to expect immediate maximum rewards for minimum effort. Any product or habit that is built to last requires regular diligent effort and persistence mixed with a copious dose of patience with oneself and with the process of change.