I've been struggling with writer's block for, what seems like, a very long time. I looked back at the date of my previous post and was shocked to see it was from a month before I married my wife. So much has happened since then that to rehash all the events of the past year would be a bit like showing vacation slides... slightly entertaining at best and tedious at worst. Perhaps in time I can address some of the more life changing happenstances but for now I have to figure out why I can't seem to sit down on a regular basis and take note of my life. I have a few reasons in mind that are fairly explanatory and I think they cut to the heart of the matter.
For one thing, I have a fear that I'm not good enough. When I start a project I always shoot for the moon. I try to nail the writing on the first try and when it doesn't work I give up. Writing is a difficult and slightly mad endeavor. Especially when you're just testing the waters like I am. It never seems right when you are in the midst of it and there's no one to tell you whether it's good or if you're fooling yourself. Say what you want about whether I should feel that way, if I'm just putting pressure on myself, or that I should do it for myself anyway; it stops the pen from reaching the page.
I also wonder what it's worth. Words have become cheap now. Ideas have been co-opted and turned into commodities upon which the world gets drunk. When things like ideas and words become cheap, you can't trust them. At the very least, you don't put much weight in them. They aren't cheap in Sudan or Ukraine. Places where life is lived on the bone, where hot soup is soul enriching, words are checked and spared, everything hangs in the balance. Every day we explore our world, we comb through the headlines and we listen to the sales pitch. We find new things and learn, learn, learn. The more we learn, though, it quickly becomes clear just how unoriginal we are. Dare I contemplate how hateful we can be, as well? Has that not become clear? Not only do we hate people who are different, we hate people who hate different people! We have indulged ourselves watching the morbid circus of human folly and the thoughtful ones become overwhelmed. Time being stolen isn't just a quaint thought, it's an ongoing crime.
A certain amount of laziness can be attributed to my malaise. When I graduated from school, I thought having the degree was enough. I thought inspiration was going to strike me and I would write as if someone was doing the job for me. For a while I did write; for several years I kept journals and made searching intrigues into poetry and fiction, never finishing a story, always losing the train of thought. I forgot the first rule of craftsmanship; it requires practice. I didn't give myself a structure or a deadline. I didn't make the requisite time and I never set a place in the world. So many ideas floated through my head like a roaming searchlight. If I had learned to tame it I might have started something. In the end, the more I let my mind drift, the more I lost my self-discipline.
There's something else, though. I've been thinking longer about this ethereal problem and I find the problem to be a lot more sinister than it appears on the surface: There's an ongoing realization by some scientists, going by the Uncertainty Principle by Heisenberg, that even as we dig deeply into the farthest reaches of scientific discovery; even as we scan the most infinitesimal quantities and look into the deepest parts of space, there will always be something more, something that we will never have the capacity to see. At first, grains of sand were thought to be the smallest things on the planet. Then, elements... molecules... atoms... ions... then... quarks. The question keeps propping up, what are those made of? The ground we stand on is simply a thin crust of cool rock on top of an ever shifting current. Some of the stars we see in the sky may just be the dying light of a sun that died many millennia ago. As a writer, as a thinker, as a student of humanity, I seek the truth. The Truth, Meaning, is the ultimate prize. Many think that dying is the great Unveiling of the truth and that true meaning will be revealed then and only then. For me, this produces a real problem. It is more than a little unnerving to come to the conclusion that there is no truth in this life... that to commit to an action requires a belief in something, but that belief is based on false notions and that only fools follow paths blindly. For a man like me, it becomes a terrible maze.
Perhaps all we can really do is try our best. And be good to people. Those are things my dad taught me.
