Worth Sharing

How easy it is to forget why you’re doing what you’re doing even while you’re doing it. To write is to collaborate with your imagination to share something wonderful or lovely or funny or scary or profound with other people. The sharing with other people is important because without them there would only be you and your diary, which is fine also, but aren’t we all glad for those people who shared what they had written with us? Indeed we are. And aren’t we happy, more or less, to pay a few bucks to read or watch or listen to what those people have shared. Why, yes we are. It’s the dreary business of staying alive that can gum-up the creative life. There are artists out there who find a paycheck ample motivation, but I count myself among the many others who do not. The moment my attention wanders from the sharing of something lovely with other people to simply building my career, or growing my readership, or padding my savings, I soon wake up to discover that I loath the whole writing business. In fact, I can’t remember ever liking it.

Now I am a hero whose only purpose is to stay alive until the final meaningless word has been writ. I begin complaining. I complain first about other people, and then about myself, and then about life in general, that which summoned me forth for no apparent purpose. The complaining does not help, but perhaps I haven’t done enough of it. No, that doesn’t help either.

Somewhere at the end of all this unhappiness exhaustion gives way to memory. At first it as if I am recalling a story I once heard, until I meet the protagonist and recognize his days as mine. I am glad to find his story is not through, and that he finds it worth telling beyond reasons he can count. Nothing in the world worth knowing can be counted, just as nothing in the world worth dreaming is worth keeping to myself.