Until

I’ve spent my life waiting “until” – I can’t write until my son is raised, until I divorce, until I retire and have time, until I move, until I live in the ideal locale and house, until I join a writer’s group, until I take necessary classes and

workshops, until I’ve had a blog for a year, until I’ve published in magazines, until I get that perfect writing table, until I redo my room into an office, until I refinish another writing retreat room, until I change my schedule at work, until I’m financially solvent, until my heart heals – or until it explodes again.  This list and devastating pervasive pattern could go on forever.  It already has, and I am so weary, exhausted, from running – away from my life, to the infinite distractions, spun up in the flurry that masquerades as life. 

I live life in deference to planning.  Planning becomes life.  Making plans, setting and working toward goals is obviously necessary but I paradoxically end up

sabotaging my goals and purported dreams by abandoning them in service of planning for them.  That’s a nice piece of work there.  When the real work should begin I panic and run, on to the next plan.  It’s always a different tune, but the same dance.

This lifelong dynamic is ingrained, a part of me, burned into me.  How to change that now?  I’m aware of it at least and that has to come first.  I’ve likely been aware for some time.  So what, what can I do?  Can I change?  That’s really the question that scares me.  Can I actually stop the madness? 

  Intellectually, I know what I need to do.  I need to stay still, sit with it, face it, follow through.  It’s never as monstrous as the avoidance makes it out to be.  I have to engage in the here and now, not “until.”  I am doing things, things that are helping.  The writing groups are giving me confidence and practice.  The writing schedule I’m barely clinging to by my fingertips provides the structure and

actual results.  I have to fight through the miasma to see the real steps I’m taking and the effects they’re having.  I have to concretely recognize the differences, the changes, the growth and progress.  Otherwise I assume I’m just still doing the same old dance.   

I recently saw Dave Congalton’s movie “Author’s Anonymous.”  I enjoyed it so much, felt a part of it, knew the insider’s secret behind the scenes details, which made it an interactive type of experience. 

The story follows a writers’ group, and their varying choices, successes and failures.  There’s a character, Hannah, who’s quirky and an anomaly for the

group, and she’s been simmering in my brain ever since I saw her.  She isn’t the stereotype of a “writer.”  She struggles for words in conversation, doesn’t know squat about classics, masterpieces, other authors.  She’s heard of them perhaps, but anything more than that, not so much.  She has no training or experience at all.  I don’t think she even went to college.  She lives with her mom, and I think she works too.  But she just “writes from her heart”, whatever’s there, and the rest of the angst just doesn’t register with her.  There’s a scene where she’s in her bedroom on her bed, snacking, her laptop by her side.  Something occurs to her, and she simply reaches out for the computer and begins writing.  She’s just ‘in it’ that simply, right there in the moment, without any preparation, a special designated place or environment.  Whatever strikes, whenever it strikes, she just engages – she just writes; without any planning, researching how to write, without all the accoutrements.  

In contrast, the angst filled protagonist is the writer stereotype.  Henry is obsessed with Fitzgerald and while he is infatuated with Hannah, he is also

slightly snobbish and judgmental that she doesn’t even know Fitzgerald and other famous authors, that she doesn’t follow the “proper” path writers are supposed to.  He has writer’s block, as is to be expected.  After all, if you have “writer’s block", then that proves you’re a “writer”, right?  He has his battle scars of rejection letters plastered on the wall of his writing space – all the proper angst.  But it’s Hannah who succeeds, in a huge way.  The message I squirrel away is she succeeds because she writes.  As Dave loves to say, she “does the work.”  I love that.  It is immensely

validating and reassuring.  With her development, he drove right into the very heart of writers – well, mine anyway.  I’m not a real writer unless I do x, y, z to infinity, until I have it all set up just right, until the stars are perfectly aligned.  But all I really need to do is write.  Can it really be that simple?

There is no “until”.  It’s all right here, right now – everything I need.  There are

no rules and I get to do this any way I need to, any way I want to.  I merely have to put down the lists, pack away the plans, and write.  A spark is not fire, and it never will be on its own.  It must be captured, cultivated and nurtured, until it actualizes as a flame, its potential realized only through work.  Sparks on the wind are beautiful to watch, to make, for just that brief moment of existence.  But then they’re gone in a

blink of an eye and we’re looking for the next one.  Unless that spark is bound to all the other components necessary for it to be what it can be, a
roaring fire, it is nothing at all, disappearing into the night, expired potential with no more “until” left.