forget.

Just start. I say it in my head often.

You think it’s no big deal. Just taking a break, just waiting a bit longer, you’ll do it later, and later, and later. And then you’re staring at the paper, staring at the screen and your fingers won’t move. They just won’t. You’re trying to form some thoughts in your head, but the attempt at awareness destroys every thought that was there.

A good practice is to write things and then forget about them. Just write it, write something, and don’t read it again. Save it in a file, in an email draft, in Google docs, in a notebook hidden on a shelf. Don’t read it again for a week, a month, a year. I think I learned this from Natalie Goldberg. It takes some of the pressure off. You might write something horrible, but you know what? You don’t even have to read it. You just write it down and tuck it away for some other time.

The beautiful thing that happens is sometimes you discover some magic in what you’ve written that, at first glance, you didn’t know was there. It might be sort of better than you first thought. You might sound a bit more inspired than you felt. But most beautiful of all is when you read something your hands wrote, but you don’t remember writing it. Suddenly you can look at your writing with some objective criticism, but also objective compassion. The words exist separate from yourself.

Many summers ago I went to Ireland for a few weeks. There was no reason - it was just a trip for the sake of a trip. It was a time in my life when a lot was changing. Being in another country opened my eyes up to some of the things in myself that I hadn’t seen or understood before. It also opened my eyes up to people and their thoughts and lives. So I wrote a lot during those weeks. I scribbled away in a crappy notebook. I wrote some unfortunate poetry inspired by a sunset and sheep. I actually tore the pages out of the notebook with every intention of dumping them in a random city dumpster, which is always my instinct. But somehow I forgot to toss them. They got buried away inside a book and the book went back in my suitcase and found it’s way back on my bookshelf and I honestly forgot - I just completely forgot.

I don’t remember when I found the pages, it was a year or more ago. But I sat down on my bed and read every word and I was looking at myself, somehow from the outside. I was looking at my hands gripping a pen and my brain thinking thoughts and my heart pumping feelings into my limbs and it was me but it wasn’t - there was a gentle distance.

The reason I’m writing all this is because I haven’t written much here lately. I haven’t written much anywhere. I have some short bits in a notebook, but otherwise I’ve been on hold. I had set several concrete goals for myself in the past few months. The existence of those goals and their pending deadlines is having an unhappy side-effect on my creative ability. No complaining, no excuses - just an acknowledgment and a deliberate renewal.

It does matter. When you kind of stop writing, your fingers kind of forget how to do it. Don’t stop.

The reason I’m writing all this is I just needed something to get through the fog and the haze, a spark to light up this tank of gasoline.

The reason I’m writing this is to take off some of the pressure.

I write for many reasons. Every time I articulate the reasons, they sound a bit different. One of those reasons is to be understood. Another is to understand. Sometimes my writing reflects me, other times it reflects the world around me and my attempts to digest and process that world. It feels a bit like trying on clothes. I write for people to read but I also write to hear the sound of my own voice. Really to find my own voice. An audience adds the smallest twinges of censorship and editing and what will they think if I say that? But the mother of all reasons, for me, is connection, which I have said again and again and I will continue to say again and again. We need more of it. So please, read on. And life is about balance in every moment and writing is about balance in every moment. All I have left to say is this: don’t stop.