want to v have to

in

Ongoing:

this mental guerilla fracas between what I want to write and what I have – what I am compelled, via surrounding circumstance and requisite processings - to write and being the devoted companion of a desire to write in a different rhythm than the one I've been sporting for the last several years.

A desire to transcend my own rhythms via my work? Perhaps.

The answer is, as always, to let what happens in the midst of The Work happen, to stay out of my own way (as best I'm able), and to surprise myself; the biggest surprise will be, I think, an increase in my capacity for staying out of my own way.

self-respect / habit (being a conversational addendum)

in

A long-needed reunion chat with a great friend yielded a discussion on how I manage to find the motivation to get up every day and write whatever it is write for no one in particular: I'm not, after all, technically on any deadline - outside of my own self-imposed ones; I haven't been contracted or asked to write anything for anyone since 2017; but, over the last year, I've churned out more stories and essays and informalities and newsletters and podcasts to this space for no one's amusement but my own than I have in the last eight years.

My initial thought was that I had simply made it habitual to the point that I literally wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't. And that's very true. But I've also realized that I left one part out of it, a notion from the source of all wisdom worth having, Mr. Leonard Cohen:

"[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt. It begins with that kind of appetite."

I do what I do every day because it's what I do every day: it's how I refill my self-respect – it's how I make each day feel as though it was lived, so it does not, as Mr Cohen says, go down in debt.