Know It All

Life knows everything that I do not. It knows what is in the heart of every reader and every editor and every agent and critic. It knows who is reading what and who is watching what, and who is sleeping and who is eating, and who is talking and what they are talking about. It knows who is lonely and who is afraid, who is comforting and who is being comforted. It knows who has died and who is born. It knows both sides of every argument, what has been stolen and returned, what has been forgotten and remembered. On a good day I feel like I know what is in my own heart. On even better days I know that this is enough. It is enough to write what I want to write, say what I want to say, and be where I want to be, which is always where I am. On these days I think I will never leave where I am, and I will never make the mistake again of believing I must know more than this.

Until my attention drifts, and there I am wondering what other people think, or wanting to know the end before I have arrived. On these days I do not even know what is in my own heart. On these days I know only that I had once oversimplified things and now I must untie the immense knot of the world’s complexity. But there is just so much to know, and how do you take even a single step until you know it all?

I ask this question in confusion and despair until I am led back to the blank page of not knowing and, if I am quiet enough, to my own heart again. For a time it had seemed like a fickle lover, abandoning me over the smallest misstep, stranding me in a world of right and wrong answers. Yet here it is, exactly where I left it, the only correct to that question called me.

Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. "A book to keep nearby whenever your writer's spirit needs feeding." Deb Caletti.

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