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I remember the day I submitted myself to the craft of writing. I had decided to write a little piece for myself. I wouldn't send it to a teacher or a friend for feedback - I would just write it, edit it like crazy, and then move on. And the goal of the little article would be to sharpen a specific skill or practice a style.
The purpose of the first piece was to experiment with the chaotic flow and lack of organization often used by Gertrude Stein. I had always thought that writing that way must be so freeing.
And I was right - it felt incredible. Although I think part of that feeling of freedom must be attributed to the fact that no one would ever see that little article, and that took away a good deal of the pressure.
Of course, that first draft was pretty rough, but it marked the start of an exercise that I've maintained for a few years: every so often, I will sit down and hammer out a piece about a random thought to develop my voice as a writer.
Below are two of those pieces.
The Art of Passive Thinking
It’s so common to discuss the losses brought by technology – the loss of face-to-face conversations, the loss of a connectedness to the here and now – but there is one loss that is often overlooked, and that is the art of thinking.
Not the art of philosophy and political thinking – that’s going strong, and if anything, it’s made more chaotic by the internet and technology. I mean that passive kind of thinking you do on a walk, or just sitting down at a restaurant before the waiter arrives or someone comes to dine with you.
It still exists, of course, in small corners and pockets of our life. There are moments when we cannot be with technology, but they are so few and far between that they are almost nonexistent unless we consciously choose them.
Think about it; when you used to be able to just look around and silently enjoy the community and “vibes” of a location, now you must be doing something. Actively thinking – about politics, schoolwork, regular work, family. Not passively thinking. It’s almost odd to make eye contact with someone walking near you. You quickly look down and pretend you were just taking a break from your real pastime – most likely checking your phone. In the elevator, for instance, to avoid the silence that, with time, has now become awkward (since no one can just stand there and think, can they? That’s just weird.) people must whip out their phone to check meaningless apps and random facts that they probably already checked five minutes before.
Let’s go back, at least every now and then, to when doing nothing was just normal, and making eye contact wasn’t a sign of having nothing to do. When we could disconnect from the global events around us and connect to the reality of the sun and the sky and the flowers and the snow and the wind. Let’s bring back the art of passive thinking.
To the Greatest of All Things (a poem)
A year ago today, I had a vivid dream
A dream of such strange condition
Where I seemed to have come
To the Greatest of All Things.
It was everywhere, and nowhere
A place of no space or time
Where limits seemed to be reached
And yet nothing at all was bounded.
Many things made sense there
That nowhere else would they be,
Like the ever-distant lovers, those great parallel lines
At one point finally did meet.
I felt rather small there, and insignificant
But an insignificance with peace too,
For there is something beautiful in just being
And in being something small and true.
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