saying nothing

it’s been months since i have published. the time has passed and i have had random moments and thoughts, but they have passed without being considered. i have been busy, i have written but allowed the words to be lost in a crash and unrecovered when restarting, i have gotten close and then reconsidered the desire to hit continue. something has stopped me from writing; i can’t seem to commit to the process. i need to figure out what, because my writing had become more than just a thing to do in a café.

i was given some advice last year. the advice was that my writing was too long. i needed to keep it short and get to the point. the advice was professional, and made sense coming from someone who read all my emails on a blackberry, but it has impacted this writing also. i no longer have the time to sit and craft a long message that no one is going to read. i enjoy the process, but it feels like a waste. i feel the muse moving away, pushed because she is impatient. she wants to get to the point, but it was never about getting to the point; it was seeing where the journey would take us. the muse has been driven away by the boredom and frustration of waiting and i remain on the wandering path.

i read a book a few weeks ago on a plane. the book started as a discussion of why talk therapy is a better solution to alternative psychological states than drugs. the basic premise was that talking allows people in need to get in touch with the deeper cause of their issues. when patients come in to discuss a recent tragedy, they tend to also discuss long ago events. they spend time passing through their lives one painful memory at a time. the author was advocating a culture of listening rather than medicating as a solution to finding solutions.

beginning to write was a way to talk things out. at a time when i was experiencing so many new things, and reconsidering many old, i found digital words to be therapeutic. capturing the moment, thinking through the entire thought, felt right. too many moments had simply passed away and were fading over time. it felt empowering to stop and remember, to realize that new moments were happening and would not just fade as easily into the past. events could be shared, if not immediately then someday in the future when someone took the time to listen.

but part of writing is about trust. trusting yourself to let go and allow yourself to open up, and trusting your readers to listen to your words and not filter then through their preconceptions. we all have cognitive structure bias, those thought patterns that allow us to skim along and make fast judgments in a chaotic world. we hear what we expect to hear, see what we expect to see and add or subtract as needed to fit the world into our comfortable pre-conceived forms.

the issues start when you realize that your readers do not have the same bias as your own. i had a college professor who did an exhibit the semester after i took his art appreciation class. i went to the exhibit with a friend and we stood in front of the work displaying willows on a snow covered field. my friend commented that the work was just about white trees, but i sensed something different. the professor had lost his wife and daughter in a car accident a year before, and as i looked at the center trees, i saw the blackness of the deep forest behind. the work was about the dark depth and the importance of the individual trees, two that i sensed to be missing from the stand on that cold winter day after a new snowfall.

other people’s biases impact our work, they stop them from seeing the truth, and after a while you wonder if there is any reason to keep talking. if they are just going to read their lives into the work, why do you keep making the effort? if you do work you may not publish; no risk of going public ruining it. you need to learn to stack your art in the corner and let it wait for a difference audience.

maybe i have been avoiding writing because i had nothing to say, or maybe because i didn’t trust myself to open up enough to make the process worthwhile. but it could also be that the thoughts are not ready to be added to the cornered pile.

then again, the real issue could be that sitting and doing nothing is easier than working on something that would be read through filters of bias.

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there is an old irish saying: "say nothing, till you hear more". sometimes, less really is more.

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