The thought I'm pondering this MLK Day morning is this: what do you do when you find yourself in the middle of living a "life of meaning," but are not sure what that means? Strange, even ridiculous - I know. But many would (and do) look at how I spend my time and tell me they wish they, too, were doing something "that mattered." Well, I have news for you all - me too. It isn't that I think I don't do things that matter; sometimes I can even point to a specific example. I guess my point is that even when you're in a "meaning-rich environment," you still have to work at figuring out how to make it really matter. For me, the toughest nut to crack is myself (yes, and I'm comfortable calling myself a nut).
Anyhow, I arrived at this train of thought while considering, once again, what kind of creative writing I really want to pursue. For some time now, I've been trying to fashion myself into a writer of genre fiction. However, I haven't been working very hard at it, of late. So, when I was reading an article this AM about a writer of personal essay, I started wondering.
That wasn't enough to send me into the "how does a life of meaning matter" by itself. As I was considering the relative merits and recipes for success the two kinds of writing represented, I realized that I am most attracted to personal essay because, to me, it represents the most authentic type of writing I could do. That's appealing, since I'm a firm believer that the only thing I'm really good at is being myself.
Even that wasn't enough to toss me into existential meanderings. What finally did it was the answer to the question: why aren't you writing essays, then? Really, the question could have easily used "anything" in place of "essays" and had the same response. Because writing requires you to believe you have something worth saying. That, to me, could be one of the most fundamental challenges any writer faces.
I have journals and electronic documents full of partially finished essays, thoughts, ideas, and repeated commitments to really knuckle down and write something this time. Even as I type this, I'm tempted to save it as a draft that "I'll get back to," knowing good and well that likely won't happen. So I'm going to stop here and commit this to the blogosphere, hoping it will be the first of many entries about this and related or unrelated topics. Think of it as an experiment in non self-editing. At least there's some words on a "page" here. That's something.
