doing.

Just about one month ago, I wrote about urge to stop and why you shouldn't. I ended with the reasons why I write, which are all changing and always different.

Two days ago, I had a conversation in a very loud Tex-Mex restaurant. It was a conversation about art, the reasons for art, the meaning to be found in life, the definition of truth. And how the rice was sort of bad.

These are things I think about often, perhaps even too much.

I was spurred on this last weekend because I read a comment somewhere, of course I don't remember where, arguing that the end goal of any piece of writing is to get at truth. In nonfiction, this is clear. And even fiction, or poetry, or any other writing - they are all trying to get at truth in their own ways. This is actually a way of thinking that, in the past, I very much ascribed to. Lately, I'm having some trouble getting myself there.

I have been hung up on this for sometime, but I'll say it yet again: I don't think I know what truth is. There is reality. As someone put it to me recently, there is the location and action of each atom at each moment. But perspective, human memory, awareness, imagination, all of it creates a world that is lots of gray and not much black and white. So what is this thing that we are trying to get at?

I question my motivations for writing. I don't mean that I question their validity, only that I question what they are. With each day, even each slow ticking hour, they change.

Here I am very frustrated with something in the world that seems wrong to me. I want to write about it.
There I am overwhelmed with a memory of an event in my past that has shaped me in ways I hadn't realized.
Here I am feeling isolated in the world and feeling the isolation of others and wanting to send out my humanity and offer connection.
There I am feeling frantic and crazybrain and I just want to say things. I just want to string words together on the page. I want to hear the tapping of the keys and see line after line fill up. I want to say the words in my head and hear their rhythm bounce and sing. I want to lay them out across my lap and admire them. I want them to mean nothing other than wildness and the unexplained and the unknown. I want to create for the mere sake of creating.

My point is that I never know exactly what is driving me.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about a man that she's been seeing. She couldn't decide how she felt about him and was questioning her motives for wanting to back away from him. Was she afraid? Maybe she really wasn't feeling it with him? I might be naive and I might be simple, but my advice was just this: it doesn't matter what your motivation is, if you don't want to go out with him, then you don't. No amount of thinking will change your trigger response.

Again, perhaps I'm a bit naive and I haven't been immersed in academia or the literary community long enough. But I give myself the same advice when it comes to writing. It doesn't matter why I want to do it or what I want to create. All that matters is that I have the urge and I damn well better act on it. My naivete is making me tired of all these rules and structures and systems for the way we should write and what we should write and how we should classify it. It is language and the creative mind and the explosion that I create on the page - I want it to be nothing more than that.

I just read this recent piece in the New York Times Magazine by Steve Almond: Why Talk Therapy Is on the Wane and Writing Workshops Are on the Rise. It's a fascinating take on the fact that everyone wants to write these days and classes are full of writers who just want a way to deal with their issues. I think this is something very looked down upon in academic circles. A writer should be concerned with their writing, not with their own psychological health.

I start to get tangled up in these how-to's and these this-is-the-way's and I get the overwhelming urge to yell SHUT UP! I also get the urge to yell WHO CARES?

I am often abstractly personal here, but not specifically. Here are some specifics: I go to an office every Monday to Friday from 8:00am to 4:00pm. I spend the majority of my days looking at spreadsheets or database entries. I also spend a good deal of time looking at the tax records of foundations, trying to figure out who they give money to, how much, and whether they will give money to us. I send and answer emails. I schedule meetings in Outlook. Sometimes I ride the bus, sometimes I walk. And the vast majority of each day and each minute, I am thinking of stories I want to tell. I am thinking of the ways I can make sense of the world in words. The ways I can sort out the messiness of my own life and draw some order from it. I am thinking about the people who are lonely, who are hurt, who are hungry and I am thinking of all the ways I could be helping them. These things and more. This is to say, at most moments I have the twitch in my hand, that I'd rather be hunched over my notebook and writing things down with a pen clenched in my fist.

I don't want to make sense of it. I don't care why I want to do it. All I care about is that I do it. I do it. I keep doing it. Something or nothing will come of it. Everyone or no one will read it. But I swear, this chest will burst and these hands will fall off at the wrists if I don't write.

I don't care why anyone wants to write. I'll choose what I want to read and when. You choose to do the thing you're longing to do. Let's be self-actualized. Let's empower one another to do that, at the very least.

This way of thinking is somewhat relieving for me because the goal is no longer a product or outcome. The goal is the process, and I think that makes life more interesting anyway. Doing is always more interesting than getting. It doesn't matter why.