The Perfect Wor[l]d - 12
If feels a little bit awkward sitting here this afternoon, the same place as yesterday, to basically expand on what I wrote previously and this morning in my journal. This process I am going through now is not part of a journey as such because there is no end, for this journey. I am not sitting here every day in the hope that one day things will change, and I will be sitting at a mahogany desk in a private studio while composing aulic literature. What I am doing now is what I want to do: to write. Don’t get me wrong! I know what I want and desire: a car/van that would allow me to move easily. Let’s make it wider and more open: I would like to be able to move easily and faster and in all directions without the constraint of public transport. I would like freedom of movement. If I felt freer to move and go wherever I want and when I wanted, I would drive almost every day to the beach, or to a park and write there: I would bring my flask and sandwich and comfortable shoes and my essential oils and books - many books - and I will have a mobile studio area that will make me feel excited and thrilled and accomplished and eager to sit there and compose and live the life I have always dreamed of. I already have my own determination, comfy shoes, flask, and my sweet little laptop and this is more than enough for now. I am sitting again in the empty canteen at College, and today there is absolutely no one around. This is what I love: silence and writing. And writing in silence. Not one interference in the flow of my own creativity. I have chosen a seat in front of a window and I can see a couple of bushes and a smoking-shed. Some people on my right walking past and a van parked close by. Sky and some buildings far away. This, to me, is the epitome for perfection. Still, I am dreading the idea that anyone could potentially come here, with their breathing and talking, and walking by dragging soles and heels; with their mobile phones without headphones, watching videos on YouTube while sharing the content with anyone else around. I am not interested in your video, in your chomping on crisps, in your bad matters, in your lack of boundaries and respect. I am not interested in you and the display of your rudeness. It is very difficult to live in Escentéa: there are no boundaries, no sense of respect. It seems that everyone is shouting and wants me to participate in a kind of power game they have decided for me. Something I haven’t requested.
Instead, being here, in this empty place, is for me like heaven. If I had to describe paradise, it would be: silent. Light breeze, sea, warm, no one. I wish you could see me now: laptop, bag, comfortable clothes, my creative totem, journal, a series of pens, a book, and a packet of Mini Cheddars. What else do I need to be happy? Really happy? Nothing. At this moment my heart is filled with a sense of accomplishment and solidity and grounded-ness and also, I have to admit, a slight sense of fear that’s all of this might end. Why would it, though? Because I can come back any time, I can write anywhere and at any time. As long as I write. This is the important thing. It doesn’t even really matter what it is that I am writing. It doesn’t matter if I am typing these very words or something else entirely, such as kajeiobciuwer souwehrue ihuseriuservuse awyseuirbuer. As long as I write. Which is not entirely true. Typing those letters before didn’t mean anything. My eyes did not look for a specific letter on the keyboard. It was just a mechanical tapping of the fingers and that’s all. But, it is not important to me if what I am writing is something meaningful and deep and highly intelligent. I could sit here and type exactly the description of what I have in my pen case, which is a yellow Moleskine hard case, with a zip, and it contains a transparent ruler, a teaspoon, a KaWeKo Sport mint green fountain pen, a VERY-Pen fountain pen, a UNI-Ball 1.0 Gel Impact, a UNI-Ball Eye needle 0.7 fine, a UNI-Ball Eye needle 0.5 micro (all black ink, of course) and finally a UNI Koro Tuga 0.5 mechanical pen.
I really thought that this would have been exactly fine when I wrote before that I could write anything, and I would be fine. But in reality: it wasn’t true. The flow of my typing was stopped multiple times to check on the details on the content and on the spelling of the names. Maybe, then, it wouldn’t be important if I stayed here and just wrote a list of things I would need to buy, like kitchen roll, and bread, and food for Virginia. But even then, my mind stopped and thought if what I was about to write would have been of any interest to you, reader, or not. In all of the above examples, which I thought were absolutely non-important in my process of writing, the flow of my writing stopped, slowed down, felt jammed, did not flow anymore. In hesitation is thought, says Ray Bradbury.
I think that when I feel the flow going, when I get the momentum right, it doesn’t matter what I am writing, it is the momentum that’s important. I could be writing a story, or a poem, or these words, just now, and the words would pour out of me. I am just typing. Matilde disappears. It is not important in this phase if the grammar is correct, or if I am writing something useful. What is important now, to me, is the mental… no! emotional state I’m creating in myself. Where this act is taking me. In this sense, writing soothes my life and me. In this sense, I can't have anyone near me making noises and talking, and asking, and just seeing someone would distract this flowing. I now understand when Steven King writes about writing with the closed door. I am not doing it for money, for a contact, for a deadline. I am doing it because there is nothing else I know and that gives me such a sense of thrill and authority of being alive. I am content, I am grateful, I am alive, and I am grateful for being alive because of what I am writing now. Because I am writing now. Of course, I hope that when these words will be out in the blog, online, they might enrich someone else. We can only be fulfilled, I think, when we do what we have come on this earth to do. I never thought I could sit here and write, for the third year in a row, producing some more ideas and physically sitting at a laptop, and do it. I had this very romantic idea that I would have had to write a book, and then send it to a publisher, and being discovered by an agent, and then these words would have come out. I thought I had to find a daily job that would support me while I craved for time off to write. Don’t get me wrong: I have time off now. I am barely working, but gosh, thank you to the Universe that allows me to sit here, basically unemployed, to do what I love the most. One of the most important lessons I have learned was to ask myself ‘how can I serve, today?’ what can I do to help others, how can I be of service and this reminded me that if writing is what I can do, I can show up here, every day, and write something.
Write something uplifting, or something I have learned, or read, or seen and if my words can change even only one person’s day, my job is done! I can only see myself as that young girl with her secret journals, and then the Pippi teenager, or the one who wrote poetry and lyrics and then the short stories and books and essays and all the writings I always did, of which the hard drives of my laptops are full. But never opened again, never expanded. All those stories I started and then left because life got in the way, because of family, because I did not feel understood, loved, accepted. All those times I felt deflated and discouraged and not supported in my craft of writing. All the times I have been shouted at, as a girl, to take my nose off the books and to see life around me, or to do some chores.
I am here now encouraging myself, telling me I can do it, I want to do it, and that I am ok in doing it. I am telling myself that it doesn’t matter if it is not perfect, polished, if there are mistakes. It’s a draft, and even the final edition will not be liked by everybody potentially because we are all different. I am telling myself that it is ok what I am doing now, what I am trying, and to hang on in there. If you need some encouragement, please, take it from me as much as you want. If you want to write, please, do. Feel free to sit and write. It is ok, that’s your calling.
As this is my calling.
© mtomat 2019 - written on 09.07.19 - no reproduction without permission.
edited and published on 09/09/19: re-reading: I am here now encouraging myself. This is what I need. This is the sign I was looking for!
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