Patience with Everything Unresolved in Your Heart
Your story isn't going anywhere without you. So, are you ready to tell it?
Obviously, I’ve been thinking a lot about the still unfolding results of the presidential election, but as the evening is winding down, I decided to take a look at what I’d written last November 5th, at the start of a fairly normal National Novel Writing Month, and it turns out that I’d mentioned a passage from Rilke:
“I would like to beg you… to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
“Patience with everything unresolved in your heart,” eh?
Last year, I talked about that passage as a way of understanding your writing practice, of learning, through your writing, to grow into the person who’s prepared to share what matters most to them with the world.
“The more you write,” I said, “the more you apply yourself to writing and grappling with the stories that lie within you, waiting to be told, the better you’ll understand how those stories need to be told, and along with that you’ll understand what you need to do to be the person capable of telling those stories.”
As you may have discovered during the last year, “what you need” isn’t necessarily to strip away all the distractions of your daily life, hole up in your room, and start writing. Sheltering in place has turned out not to be so creatively liberating for many of us, and as you’ve no doubt been hearing all along, and not just from me, that’s okay.
Even if we thought we’d be sufficiently free from distraction to get a whole mess of writing done, many of us have come to realize that the distractions of the outside world have a way of making themselves felt—and they are often abetted by our internal distractions. Suddenly it becomes a lot easier to watch another TV show, especially if you can tell yourself that you need to stay on top of what’s happening.
It’s not always easy to know when you’re avoiding your writing practice and when you’re engaging in restorative self-care. So I’m explicitly not blaming you for turning on the TV, or picking up another book, or trying out another sourdough recipe, or whatever it is you’ve been doing to distract yourself. I’ve got my own coping mechanisms, and every one of them has been getting a solid workout since March.
The story you need to tell will still be waiting for you, when you’re ready to come back to it. I suppose the question, then, is: What, if anything, can you do to get yourself ready sooner rather than later?
Deadlines imposed from the outside often help, if you’re in a position where you can get somebody to impose a deadline on you, one that actually comes with meaningful consequences if it’s not met. I forget where I heard this story, so I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I sort of remember hearing about one woman who cut a large check to a political organization she despised, handed it to a close friend, and told that friend to mail the check in if she hadn’t delivered a finished draft by a specific date. Drastic? Sure. But it got the job done.
But maybe I should ask you: What are some of the things you’ve done to make sure your writing gets done?