Forgetting What You Have

I have a chapter in my book Fearless Writing about finding time to write in a busy life, a life that usually isn’t (yet) supported by writing. The upshot of the chapter is that the question those people who are having the most trouble scheduling writing between work and childcare and dinners with spouses need to answer isn’t, “How do I find the time to write?” but, “Is writing a waste of time?” This unspoken question is usually what prevents us from making the time for something we actually love to do – the fear that it’s not productive, that unless we know we’re going to be successful, see our book published, actually make a living at it, it’s not worth doing.

I owe this chapter to one student in an early iteration of a Fearless Writing workshop I taught a couple years before the release of the book. As had happened many times before, he asked about making time to write. I gave the answer I usually gave, which was to think about how much you loved to write, how much you valued what you had share, and to think of writing like visiting a best friend. This had helped many people before, and I assumed it would help him. When I got done with my familiar speech, this student said, “That was lovely, and passionately expressed, but totally useless to me.”

I thought about it for weeks afterward before I realized he was probably secretly asking whether writing was a waste of time. It was an epiphany that went off like a firecracker in my mind, and I never taught Fearless Writing the same again, and I knew I would include a chapter about it when I wrote the book. Yet I don’t know if I would have found this without that student. I’d known since I found writing as a boy that writing was not a waste of time because I loved to do it. I’d known it so naturally and intuitively, that I didn’t even know I knew it.

Which meant I also didn’t know how valuable it was. A lot of teachers, myself included, teach what we had the most trouble learning. I learn the value of a point of view by living for so long with its opposite. Nothing teaches like the empirical, irreplaceable twin experiences of suffering and relief. Oh, how we value breathing when we’ve been held under water for a minute. Yet we forget this every-moment pleasure after a few breaths. Sometimes we need other people and their suffering to teach us what we have forgotten we have, teaching to remember so we might teach them to remember too.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence.
You can find William at: williamkenower.com