A Breakthrough?

It is, I suppose, the human condition that something seemingly so difficult is usually so very simple. If you love someone say so. If you love to do something, do it. If you’re a writer, write.

I’m not sure, nor does it matter, why so much soul-searching and wrestling has marked my self-understanding as a writer. I suspect it has much to do with my own psyche. But I think it also has to do with the era in which I grew up: aptitude tests, school counselors, Myers-Briggs, vocation and occupation, choosing your degree program in your freshman year, and so forth. We are groomed to choose what we’re going to do with the rest of our lives before we’ve even left puberty. None of these things are love.

I was speaking with a friend, whom I’ll call Hazel-Eyed Muse, and she remarked that in recent days my daily writing has had an effect on me, stabilizing me during stressful times, offering an outlet of expression. Quilters and gardeners would probably say similar things about their own creative actions.

I think I know some of the reasons why it took twenty years for the realization that writing is for love, and love is the why of writing, to dawn on me. What I think has happened (it may be too soon to tell), is that I have returned to a former state of naïveté about writing. There will come a time when the business of publishing will impinge upon this exercise of writing. But I am writing consistently and more and more eagerly each day.

It is said of married couples whose relationship has reached a state of depletion and close upon the time it must fall apart, that if they wish to capture that glow of first love, that renewal of passion, the joy of discovery, they must simply do the actions they did at first. No thought should be given of absent feelings and whether they will ever feel in love. They are simply to do the actions they once did: compliment one another, use pet names, write love notes, buy special little surprise gifts, go to dinner and a movie, flirt and tease. The accumulation of all these little loving actions will serve to draw and to enlarge those in love emotions of romance and passion. As one priest put it to me: If one wants to save one’s marriage, live out the Sermon on the Mount with one another.

I’m no marriage counselor, but I can say this about my recent experience with regard to writing. It is the doing of the little actions of writing that has enkindled a renewed love of writing. This has gotten me past all the things that were blocking the flow of that love: income, query letters, whether or not anything I wrote would ever get published, was I writing anything anyone would ever read. The bills will always need to be paid. The laundry will always need to be done. Toilets will need to be scrubbed. None of those preclude surprise bouquets of tulips delivered to work. And no amount of publishing  or vocational angst should ever diminish the sheer joy of writing.

Can the vocation of writing be that simple? Can the determination about one’s calling really be as basic as loving it? Bless God, I think it can.