As Natalie Goldberg asked me to do in her chapter “Writing as a Practice,” I’m going to sit down right now and give her this moment. What’s running through me?
I’m alone in the house, with just two sleeping pets, and I’m surrounded by calm, and green, and music. I’m writing – a thing I didn’t expect to ever get to do, and haven’t done for myself, in a very long time. I get so caught up in worries about what I’m writing and doing and thinking – what would other people think if they could hear inside my head? I’ve worked for a very long time to shut those voices down (and that’s a large part of what led to my drinking – shutting the Peanut Gallery in my head up). I guess I could track my learning to be concerned with what other people thought about what I was doing to the influence of various people in my life, in the past, but does that really matter? I get caught up in the why, and the fixing of the problem sort of gets shuffled to the background while I try to understand why.
Sometimes we don’t get to understand why. Sometimes we just have to do, and go, and be, and let the why remain an asked question, but be comfortable with no answer, or no answer that we can hear (I believe we get answers more than we realize, but that frequently, they just are outside of our range of hearing).
Am I warmed up now? Am I excited to start? Do I believe I can? Let’s go see.