Nothing To Lose

If you write, you know what it is to sit there alone at your desk waiting for the idea to come and how, when it does and if it’s a good one, you could be in that happy flow following where the story’s going for an hour or two. If you’re like me, being in that flow is as good as life gets. This is not an exaggeration. What more could I want other than to be interested and surprised and satisfied, to express in the world – if only on a page – what I knew first in the private theater of my imagination. There is something soothing and nourishing to see the barrier between what is inside of me and outside of me dissolved, to be reminded it is all the same.

It’s not the only time and place you can find this flow, but it’s particularly instructive finding it while writing. There I’m alone, and the page is always blank to start. I’m not responding to or interacting with anything other than my own curiosity and imagination. I am the beginning and the end of that creative experience. I can forget this since I’m the one who asks the question and something else invariably answers, but the fact remains no one else is in the room with me. I could, if I weren’t so fussy about my workplace, write anywhere and anytime. All I need is my mind and a pen and paper.

In this way, writing has taught me not to believe in loss. To be clear, I have lost plenty in my life. I’ve lost friends and loved ones, lost pets, lost things and money. So it will always go. Everything living must someday die, and everything not living will rot or rust. Seen from a certain angle, life can appear tragic, an inescapable cycle of pleasure known and then gone, of always reaching and never grasping, a flower confined to the brief season of its bloom.

I can certainly succumb to this compelling though fatalistic narrative, especially when the news of the world turns so dark. Except the story loss tell us is the end of pleasure, the end of joy and peace and safety. The end, indeed, of everything we want. To believe in that story is to disbelieve what creativity has already shown me again and again and again: that nothing and no one can take from me what is already wholly mine. All I have ever wanted comes from me and through me, as it does for everyone, because we are not the flowers but the garden itself.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

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