old words.

I am wild with the need to write. Wild with it. I love it.

I was looking over this blog today and my eyes landed on the Twitter feed on the right. I have fallen out of that Twitter habit, which is ok for now. I might pick it back up in the next months, but for now it’s ok. One life lesson I’ve learned: don’t try to form or break too many habits at the same time. Being overwhelmed is the surest way to abandon your goals. At any rate, I hadn’t realized before that Twitter lists those tweets by how many days old they are. The most recent one is 134 days ripe. What?

I realize that, in other words, that is a few months. But there’s something about seeing the number of days that makes it feel an epic long while ago. And so, seeing those 134-days old words made me think of T.S. Eliot.

For I have known them all already, known them all --
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
- The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot

A dear friend sent me a link to this post yesterday. I zeroed right in on the end, which contains the thought I will carry with me for the next many days:

"There is literally no reason not to write. Nothing bad can come of it. Even if no one reads what you are writing, you have a chronicle of something. You are creating something. I’m not the first to say it, but the act of creating almost always leads you somewhere you never would have gone otherwise, and makes you see things differently. How is that ever bad? The luckiest among us might even get nice notes from readers saying how much what we’ve written has inspired them. I’m telling you, if you are coming from a real place, there’s no question that will happen.” - Jenny Rosenstrach (of Dinner: A Love Story)

I daresay sometimes bad can come of writing, depending on what you might write and who will read it. But the point (the pointy-point, as I like to say) is that putting words down is powerful creation. It is life-altering, vision-shattering, world-defining creation.

On May 8, 2012, I copied down this quotation:

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." - Carl Sagan

BOOM.
Do it, do it, do it.
CREATE CREATE CREATE.
It’s worth it.
Find people who remind you it’s worth it and keep them around.
CREATE CREATE CREATE.