Sunday, May 29, 2011

I live one writing day at a time.........

Louisa May Alcott said, "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship." My life is the ship I am learning to sail. It is through my writing that I learn about myself and the path(s) my life can take. Just like a ship sailing the ocean it has a course and a destination and so does my writing life. Each time I sit at the blank screen and begin to type I am plotting a course to reach my destiny. What that destiny is I don't know. The choices I make, the people I become involved with, how many words I choose to write each day all steer me down various paths to my destiny.

I may never reach my destiny because of the choices I make in my life that keep me away from my writing life. How many people die with regret because they know they didn't fulfill their destiny? I don't know if I will reach my destiny before I die, but I do know that I am making better choices when it comes to how important my writing is to my destiny. I use to put writing off until tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. I didn't have the courage to say "No" I want to be alone with me and write today. I was so dependent on other people to feel alive I couldn't sit still and write how alive I felt because it wasn’t my life I was feeling it was theirs. Today I can say "No" because I have found moderation in my life and my writing life. I live two separate lives.

When I didn't have the courage to say, "No I need to write today" I lived in a world of worry and fear. These worries and fears made me lose all perspective on what my reality actually was. My life was a nightmare. I was drowning in the love, want and need of and for others. It is a strange place to be to have all that love, want and need become so consuming you can't breathe. There is nowhere for you to run because their love and your need for love follow you wherever you go. In the state of suffering and suffocation I could not write.

My suffering was about the future and what I would gain or what I would lose if I said "No." As I have learned to live my life in the present in the very moment I am breathing in fear and worries of the past have slipped away. I live one writing day at a time and I make the most out of that day. My courage to write my truth and my reality is hinged on my ability to remove fear from my mind by just staying in the moment. I just have to do something for my writing life today. I don't have to worry about yesterday and what I did and I don't have to think about what it is I need to do tomorrow because tomorrow never comes.

Preparing for a future that may never come about is a way of protecting myself from exposure. If I predict an outcome then I plot a course to make my own prediction come true. If I say I am going to write tomorrow then I am predicting I am not going to write today and that is exactly what happens. I don't write a single word today.

Fellowship with other writers has kept me honest about my writing and non-writing. When I communicate with a group of writers who write as much as they can in a single day then my day reflects theirs and I write as much as I can in a single day. Like-minded people lift each other up. People not of my like mind don't understand the need for me to empty my head, to write and explore what I feel and have experienced and felt in my past. I write who I am and I discover who I am by writing what I remember of my history.

As I reflect back on my worries and fears that kept me from writing I realize that most of them never came to pass and those that did materialize my best preparation would not have been enough to prevent the episode or situation from happening. As I have grown into my writing self [through writing I can't stress that enough] my faith in my destiny has enhanced. My self-esteem and self-trust has soared. I am not talking about false pride look at me. I am talking about internal satisfaction, comfortable in my own skin, happy to be living this writer's life. I have become capable of doing for myself what I have always looked for others to do for me. I have developed a belief that I can and am achieving my destiny. All I do each day is take the appropriate action in my writing life and the pages just fill up.

I am no longer afraid to say "No" to people or to myself for that matter. There are times when it is necessary to say "No" to myself because I am imperfectly human and want to side step the discipline it takes to be a writer writing this writer's life, but the more I write the more I am learning how to steer my ship to my finally destiny. The goal is to arrive without regret. Louis L. Hay wrote, “I now choose to rise above my personality problems to recognize the magnificence of my being. I am totally willing to learn to love myself.” So here I go trudging the Road of Happy Destiny……..some of you will know where that belief comes from J

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