Unerring Destination

When I was young, I developed a habit – or, perhaps more accurately, a strategy – of always wanting to have something to look forward to. Looking forward to something simultaneously stirred a little pleasure within me in the moment, made the future a friendly destination, and, in a vague way, gave me a sense that my life was headed in the right direction. I was right to have identified how important pleasure, a friendly future, and a meaningful direction were to my life. I would never choose to be without any of these. It also primed me for the most insidious aspect a writer’s life, where so much time is spent anticipating the acceptance letter, the contract, the review, or award – that moment when Life Will Be Better.

You have likely already perceived the flaw with this strategy. It puts nearly all your attention on the future, where you aren’t and where, in fact, you will never be. Even I eventually began to sense that my approach might not be foolproof. Yet here is an added problem to regularly practicing a broken strategy: you come to associate with Pavlovian unconsciousness the result and the habit. That is, if I gave up always wanting something to look forward to, I felt as if I would also be giving up pleasure, a friendly future, and a meaningful direction to my life – and that I could never do. So, I kept on with the strategy, even though it continued to ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied and uncomfortable.

When you live as long as I had in this fashion, there will come a time when you will have no choice but to abandon the old idea of where well-being can be found before you have anything clear with which to replace it. This is where writing can serve as a good practice. When I reach the end of a sentence and don’t know what should come next, I must be willing to sit comfortably with the feeling of what should follow without yet knowing what it will be. In doing so, I do not feel deprived, for I still have the desire and the momentum from which the next sentence will emerge.

I’m the sort of person who can be very hard on himself. That’s another screwy strategy meant to keep me from making mistakes. I must therefore be gentle when I recognize that what I’m doing isn’t working. Sometimes I start a sentence and I know it’s wrong when I’m only halfway through, sometimes I take it out on the final edit, and sometimes I see it clearly once it’s been published. Either way, I only wrote the sentence because I thought it would help the story, and I only wrote the story because I wanted to share something I hoped would bring pleasure and meaning to the reader. Those desires will never change, they are with me forever, through all my false starts and wrong turns, a constant and unerring destination.

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

William KenowerWriting, William Kenower, Future, FearComment