Well Fed

I love to write and I love to teach workshops and compose music and play the piano and play games online with my friends and have good conversations, but there’s the thing: all the pleasure I derive from those pursuits and activities doesn’t actually come from what I’m doing. It sure seems like it does, however. I often look upon what I love to do like food that feeds my soul. I might even use those very words, that my soul needs feeding. There are certainly days I feel as though it’s malnourished, empty and neglected, like a herd animal stranded in some barren field.

Meanwhile, my body does need feeding. Every day, in fact. It will wither away if I don’t, but it will also puff up and get saggy in places if I feed it too much. My body has something called an appetite which is ideally suited to regulate this feeding, but I can ignore this regulation, can override it. I will sometimes do just that, eat and eat though I am not hungry, when I feel my soul is empty. It’s easy to mistake one thing for another when everything, body and soul, are all the parts of me. As easy as mistaking writing and music and conversation for happiness itself.

Sometimes, after all, those things that brought me such pleasure yesterday seem to bring no pleasure today. Were they really food for my soul, they would be able to feed it whenever I wrote or played or chatted. The emptiness I’ve known is just forgetting, placing all my pleasure and wellbeing in something outside of me. It won’t do, even when that thing outside of me is something I love to do.

I don’t know how it is for you, but I maintain a kind of loyalty towards those things I have enjoyed doing, like friends whose company I have loved. I am so grateful for the time spent with them, so grateful for the lightness and pleasure and discovery and surprise, that I feel I owe them something more than that gratitude, as if but for them, my life would be empty. Yet it was my life, my soul, that found them, not the other way around. The soul needs no feeding. It is the light and rain from which all that feeds me grows.

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

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com