I’ve gone quiet recently. The biggest reason being that I seem to have settled down for a little bit and am staying busy and content in my day-to-day. Since mid-March, I’ve been staying on Bodhi Farm, in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
I stoked the fires of my writing habit early in 2020, under conditions particularly conducive to it: I was bored, having left my job without a clear plan, and I had a lot of time to myself. There’s a reason writer’s retreats are a thing. Most of the time, you’d prefer to do anything else rather than write. So isolating yourself increases your odds of actually buckling down to write. Oh, and there was one other thing I had that was important to writing for me: dissatisfaction. Yearning, fire, discontentment, ennui. I had pent up energy, and I needed somewhere to direct it.
As I embarked on my wander, I spent most of my time alone. And while I wasn’t necessarily bored in the way that being cooped up in a Queens apartment might engender, I certainly had plenty of down time. So I wrote. I wrote with the discipline of someone whose mental well-being depended on it over the course of the prior 8 months. And I stoked my fire, by following social media and the news, and by reading provocative books.
But as I was transitioning away from my NYC cloister, my discipline certainly was beginning to lapse. I could sense it beginning when I was in the New Orleans, where the call of the city was much stronger than my own timid calls to stay in and write. And then came my time in Menard, TX, where I faced disquiet and ennui that put me into what felt like motivational survival mode (rather than thriving). To the extent that I wrote formally (as opposed to my daily journaling, which has continued uninterrupted for over a year), it was in short bursts primarily trying to understand my experience. It was infrequent and undisciplined. And maybe that’s what set me off on this new pattern, from which I never quite recovered.
As I kept heading further west, the outside environment engaged me more and more, and I took less and less time to write about my internal world. I suppose you could say that I was living life, rather than writing about it. And when put that way, it sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? (It’s pretty aligned with the mission I set from the outset.) I suppose the issue for me is that I feel ashamed to simply be living life. My sense of obligation to be “doing” something is so firmly ingrained in me (by society, by my family, by my peers, by the media, by my education, etc.) that I am regularly questioning my sense of certainty about what I’m doing. (And even more regularly questioning it, the longer my wander continues.) My (public-facing) writing has given me the feeling that I’m “doing” something.
From the start of my wander, I’ve gotten into my head (perhaps delusionally) that the “something” that I’m “doing” is inspiring others to question the world and to assert greater agency in their lives. Whether or not my writing has done this maybe doesn’t matter so much as my feeling of purpose in my writing. But the question of impact from my writing is hard to ignore. Is my writing worthwhile if I’m not actually impacting anything outside myself (even if it has the potential to do so)? If my answer is, “Yes, I’m still “doing” something in writing a blog that doesn’t help others,” then could it not also be just as worthwhile to be journaling every day?
Where’s the line for what’s an acceptable use of my time? And who determines what’s acceptable? What’s proper? It strikes me that a source of the planet’s overheated climate and drive for constant growth is this deeply-ingrained feeling across swaths of Western culture (and burgeoning Eastern capitalism-influenced cultures) that there are proper and improper ways to spend our lives. And the most proper uses of our time seem to be ones that drive economic growth and activity. But even more broadly, it seems that proper ways of spending time are those that contribute in some way to the world around us. The most improper ways to spend our lives involve behaviors for and by ourselves. Such behaviors are deemed selfish, I guess.
Is that actually the culture? Or is that just my personal feelings? It’s probably a bit of both. But I can’t help but wonder how different the world might be if everyone (you included) had started our vocational lives not from a place of “How will I contribute to the rest of the world”” or “How will I make a living?” but rather from “What do I love to do?” and “What am I truly and fundamentally good at doing?” (The next question might then be “Of the things I love and am good at, which of them, if any, do I want to share with the world around me on a consistent basis?”)_Well, I began writing this post as an update on life here on the farm in New Mexico. I guess it’s turned into something else entirely, albeit not unwelcome. I guess that just means I have a reason to write another post in the near future.
As always, stay curious, notice the magick, and wander on.
PS: Now, for no reason whatsoever, here are some photos of animals.
