Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Law of Attraction #8 - A Bigger Picture?

I have wanted to write since I was roughly 11 years old.  I should be saying I have been writing since I was roughly 11 years old, but the truth is I haven't.  Not consistently.  Sometimes I was more drawn to photography.  Sometimes it is as if I lay dormant.  Honestly, a lot of the time that is what my writing feels like.  Dormant.  I almost feel shame to say it, but ideas do not come easily to me.

Which is hilarious!  Because ideas DO come easily to me.  One of my favorite things to do with friends is talk about all sorts of philosophical ideas.  In other words, we pick a topic and see just how hot the air in this room can get!  That can't be your favorite parlor game without having some ideas!  I have never been good at adapting my thinking to subjects and plots.

Photography has almost no thinking at all.  What I mean is, for me, it is not a form of intellectual expression.  Oh sure, I had some photo projects in school that were more about concept than photo and were quite mind driven, but my photography, the stuff that excites me, is about emotional expression.  So it is easy to get into the "flow" or "vortex" or no-mind oneness (depending on whose dictionary you're going by) in photography.  It hasn't been with writing anywhere near as often.

I do believe we each have one gift.  A talent at something.  Maybe like writing or maybe in temperament or strength?  The things that get under your skin and course through your blood like writing and photography do for me are clues.  I think that's why you see books over the years with titles that tell you "Do What You Love and The Money Will Follow."

How many times do I have to hear that before I surrender to it?  I'm a great cheerleader to it, but in practice it's like trying to fall asleep and being startled awake.  Over and over again.  It always feels like I hedge my bet and doing that is saying I might lose or I might be wrong.

Wait a minute.  Here's the thing.  That's sounding like I expect some sort of reward for what I'm doing.  Of course I would want that, but that isn't my focus or what I am saying.  I mean simply that to write something implies one has a reader.  I've never expected to have a reader.

Recently I fell in love.  Loved and lost.  Ah well, happens to nearly all of us at some point.  I think a heretofore unnoticed gift he gave me is the knowledge I had a reader.  He was the first person in the world who I had the honor of speaking with who had read some of my writing before we had actually ever spoken to each other.  I know he read some of my writing.  I know he could hear my voice.  I know he enjoyed some of it.  If we were on speaking terms, I'd thank him for some of the wonderful gifts I received.  Ah life.

Maybe that's why lately I have gotten into the "flow" in some of my writing.  Here on this blog.  I've even been there twice on those 99 videos in 99 days.

I've always thought in the end it would be fiction.  I'd finally get an idea, squeak out a novel and then probably croak.  Now I wonder.  It really seems like my trajectory is aimed more at engaging in an intellectual parlor game with whoever wants to read it on the internet.  Not sure how the money would follow from that, but it certainly would be lovely because I am having a good time and this might just be love.

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