Into the void

It's been way too long and I have had so many fleeting moments over the past four months where I "intended" to write, to make myself sit down and capture what I considered good thought, careful, practical insight. But the moment passed. I've recently asked myself why I let that happen.

First, I know as well as anyone after all these years of meeting so many interesting people who said time and again: "I'm going to write a book". The equivalent today is even simpler: "I'm going to post something on my blog". But we wait, postpone, excuse; we have so many other useful things to do, practical problems to solve, and ways to entertain ourselves, masquerading as taking care of our overworked and underpaid lives. "I'll write a post when I'm on vacation, when the semester ends, when the weekend comes, when I've graded this last bunch of papers, when the wedding season ends".

But the void always fills up. With something. A new TV series. Marketing for new business. Getting back to the gym on a more regular basis. Visiting with girlfriends. Catching up on reading. Organizing the closet.

I used to think my fear of failure was what kept me from blog posting until I realized that as nobody reads this, what's to worry? Then I saw that my procrastination came from fear of the void. I have nothing to say, even and especially when I have these insights and self messages to get it down into a cohesive set of sentences. But that mirror of voidness is what I face every time I sit down to write material under a deadline. Fifty four times this year I wrote wedding love stories and every single time, I started the work with what felt like an empty tank. Maybe that's a chronic condition, this void, only compounded by having no audience and no deadline. It's all a void, everything I do all day, but the hustle bustle creates an illusion more comfortable than making sense of life with words. God help me if word crafting gets in the way of my public television addiction. Well, I did it: made a date with the void and made it through.