a wonderful quote i found the other day about writing. it drove home the point of how to begin and how to carry on. the ending I found the most poignant. sometimes you simply have to keep writing.

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”

-alan watts.

not so certain I have taken the advice wholly to heart yet. it could be that i am still trying to figure out what it is that I have to say and who my audience might be. it is something about this feeling of having arrived to something that seems empty or out of place. how contentment is not enough, and over capacity too much. having, as a friend of mine put it, arrived at a finish line but unsure of what the race was about and where everyone else is.

people go about their lives thinking they are making progress and have a destination. they fret over things that after a while will not matter and they overlook the things that do. we constantly are at odds with what we want and what we have. taken together, this myriad of moments and things juxtaposed to form our rituals and habits. our obsessions and our distractions. we think we are going straight ahead but are actually spinning around in circles. just like the earth, spinning around a universe that we barely think about and fret about our things or relationships within the immediate surroundings.

we will depart one day. all of us. enter into the slumber that we came out of. all of our things, relationships and dents in this world absorbed back into itself. we come from nothing and end with it. in between, we have these moments to go about our days interacting with the objects and people who also happen to be awake and enter our vision. for better or worse, we do what we can to make the journey as important and as easy to swallow as we can.