Hidden Doors

I had a conversation w/Jen today about what I like about writing…or more, what I get out of spending my time writing. It’s worth remembering so I’m writing it down in case I manage to forget about it again. I find writing, under the ‘right’ circumstances, absolutely absorbing. I can lose hours and hours to it when everything is flowing well and, when I come out of it, I’m exhausted but also sort of elated at the same time. I think I was trying to explain why I don’t do this more often but what I ended up with was – why the hell don’t I do this more often? If the point is to do what you love, and I love to write, why do I resist it so consistently? It absorbs me in much the same way reading or watching a great movie/television show can only much more enjoyably, engagingly so. I love that sense that the rest of the world has disappeared for a space of time – that feeling of living so entirely in my own head that almost anything could have happened outside and I wouldn’t have noticed. It’s the one thing I’ve experienced that encourages me to believe in the idea that we really might be the creators of our own universe. It’s the same feeling when you’ve been entirely focused on a particular idea or problem and you come out of it and feel that slight disconnect with the world around you for a moment or two before things go back to normal. Like remembering to breathe again only more…and less…and definitively so. I do this often enough, given the right set of circumstances, even without the writing...I’ve lost hours that I’ve never yet regretted like this…and I can’t really say what I was doing or thinking or being in those hours except that I remember them as those times in which being myself stopped being an idea and just…was. What I find interesting about it is that, once you’re out of it, you can’t really get back…like, that was your moment with the divine for the day and asking for more is a bit past presumptuous…writing taps into that feeling for me…course, writing isn’t always a reliable path either – sometimes it’s all I can do to string any words together in any kind of coherent fashion. And sometimes I don’t manage it at all.

I find myself inspired lately for brief flashes and then I think about it too closely and it’s gone – like the inspiration is being almost deliberately short-circuited between my emotions and my head. I think of all the obstacles rather than the inspiration to create and that’s it, I’m done…and I hate it. The door literally slams shut in a room with no windows…and a trapdoor I can’t believe I’ll ever find.