To live a life worth writing about

It has been quite some time since publishing the last blog post. God, where has the time gone?

Or better yet, how have I spent all the time that has passed?

Since October last year, it's not as if the stream of curious questions had suddenly stopped flowing. The weekly habit of sitting down with a pen, paper and an intent of putting form to wandering ideas has continued to be a part of everyday life. But as with the flow of any river, it is the lighter sediment that gets carried away downstream, out of sight and out of mind.

The passing of time has clearly unveiled a gap in the process, in that I have come to neglect the work that is necessary to publicise the rough drafts, the buried potatoes and the uncut gems that I have scribbled down and hidden away in my notebook. Let there be no doubt that there is work involved in honing such material into a better form, such that they could be of some value to other minds beyond just the confines of this individual — but was it really this upfront demand that was the obstacle here?

The above reflections would hint towards the thought that I enjoy writing out questions and wrestling with ideas more than I enjoy the process of editing, refinement and publishing. I feel that this would largely be true.

One of my favourite places in Melbourne to write in is the National Gallery of Victoria. I could sit in one of their great galleries and write for hours, barely needing to shift a muscle — so much so that sometimes I wonder if the patrolling museum attendants think I'm up to no good for being so still.

If writing feels easier than publishing, then, why is that the case? Well, it's definitely much less taxing to keep my ideas to myself! Crisp communication can get thrown out the window if the primary concern I had to deal with was increasing the word count. And if this was the intent, then perhaps the process shouldn't be referred to as 'writing' and instead would be more accurately represented by 'journalling' — in that all written thoughts would be kept private, and fully decipherable only by the author himself.

One of the many questions implied in the word 'writing' is: who are you writing for? And it is this consideration of audience that seems to make the distinction between this particular form and private journalling.

This is not really a question I've considered that deeply about so far in my personal history of blog writing. As strange as it might sound, much of the process to-date has been governed by an indeterminate and mysterious goal that would look something like: 'to look beneath the surface of what appears.' And if there were to be an 'audience' who I was writing for, that audience would have at minimum a single participant, and that person would be myself.

'How do you know what to write about?' is one of the complicated questions friends would ask that, much to their disappointment, I would struggle to give a clean and neatly packaged answer to. The reason for this is because the actual process of writing is far more mysterious than what I'd like to give it credit for. At least in my head, the idealistic stereotype of a person who 'writes' could be ascribed with words like determinism, will power and self-actualisation. But for me, writing has rarely been associated with such words. I am much less in control of the outcome than I'd like to admit!

On one hand, the form that is writing can objectively be viewed as a deterministic technique for putting physical form to transitory ideas. On the other hand, writing subjectively feels like opening up a channel into some unknown and to play the role of astute observer who's primary role is to document whatever it is that emerges through.

Yes, more often than not it is true that creating the time and space in my life to sit down and write is motivated by the desire and need to document what is in mind — but this is only the very beginning of the journey. This initial burst of motivation appears to be the minimum activation energy required to initiate the channel, with the rest of the writing process invested towards doing justice to what emerges.

What does it mean to 'do justice' to what 'emerges'? Well, with the primitive tools at my disposal, I feel both a sense of responsibility and curiosity to capture in words the most accurate, clear and concise representations of what is being observed. And while I may never fully comprehend where such material originates from, this knowledge gap does not appear to be sufficiently devastating to want to drop such a pursuit completely.

There's an implicit proposition within this that poses the idea of: 'if you can observe, you have material to write about.'

But how will I know what is worth writing about? How will I know that the writing would be worthwhile? How will I know whether those who do read the blogs may find some value in the written words?

There are no easy answers to such questions and, perhaps, this is a sign of misplaced presuppositions. Such questions place heavy emphasis on the receipt of the outcome and do not talk at all about what it means to produce such outcome in the first place. Would this not be akin to diagnosing a symptom for the cause?

If writing can be said to be a kind of meditative process of observation and articulation, then writing 'well' could mean capturing ephemeral truths in the highest fidelity possible.

Through this interpretation, writing becomes a form that is less intimidating in its stature, in that it's not so much about going from zero to one, from blank sheets of paper to manufacturing a multi-generational legacy, but of producing a historical archive of what has already been experienced, thought of or imagined into being.

The idea of 'living a life worth writing about' places the first emphasis on 'living a life'; the writing then becomes a sort of by-product of a life worth living.

'The man who makes a mistake can repent; but the man who hesitates, who does nothing, who buries his talent in the earth — with him, he can do nothing.'

— Van Neistat