I’ve been avoiding journaling like the plague.
Like that tired idiom, writing feels simultaneously uninteresting and yet still deeply appropriate. I loop through the same self-evaluations every day: it is morning, I am tired, there are rabbits in my apartment, what do I write? It’s a strange time and I don’t quite know what to do with it.
I’ve walked the hallways of my past so much that my footsteps have polished the floors. The present is as homogenous as a Mumford & Sons concert. And the future is, to challenge Ms. Natasha Bedingfield’s evaluation, actually unwriteable.
My entries often look exactly like this (in fact, I’ve stolen my own personal journaling thoughts and pasted them here, an offering to the internet). But this morning I chained together further lines of questioning: what am I learning right now? Who will we be after all this? Is Twitter a healthy media snack? Do I have to read the newly released books, especially if I don’t have access to the library? What can I even say right now? Is anything new? Are these questions helpful? What day is it? How am I? Who am I?
It was a nice feeling, looking over my scrawled entry to see question marks dotting the page like Plinko pegs. I dropped answers through them, to see if anything stuck—no dice. Looks like that Rilke letter about embracing the Qs and living our way into the As was right all along, old gal. Remember when you wanted to get that very quote tattooed on your skin, without first checking to see, I don’t know, how he felt about women? (My research is very incomplete). Anyways, here is the quote in case you need it again today, like you always do:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Ask your little fist to unclench whatever it’s holding tightly today, so that it can be open and ready to pluck the answer when it’s ripe.
Next Steps: Drink a glass of water, close Twitter and read a poem instead, nourish yourself with something new.
The rest is still unwriteable