new year resolution
I have always been too impressed by intelligence / wit / talent in people … to the point where I forget to notice how empathic (or not) they are. This year, I will begin to change that. See I have come to believe that kindness – towards yourself and others – is the beginning of wisdom. Okay, I know. Not only is it beyond mid-January, I am old enough to know this already. May sound pretty basic, but this psychologist is just about getting it. Better late than never!
ramble free
Feel the need to write today. About nothing specific, just to write.
I wonder what the act of writing does – psychologically. While you are writing, there is a heightened sense of belief in your thoughts, a strengthening of conviction in your feelings. There is also an evolution of existent thoughts and feelings that might not ordinarily occur.
Most important for me: there’s a withering away, whether fleeting or lasting, of self-doubt. And the thought of creating a starkish black and white, from your typically thousand shades of grey, is nice. After that, you glide back in to a kind of cognitive twilight from where you came.
The twilight is neither a dark nor claustrophobic one. In fact, it is a space without boundaries – quite different from the world of words. There are no letters and no word is set in stone. Thoughts are malleable, grammar has little to say, vocabulary is only as big as the next word, and you are free to place commas (or not) between a myriad visuals. It’s that one place where there is utter freedom of thought.
While that freedom does not vanish when you articulate something, there are certainly great constraints put on it when you do. Suddenly, you are limited by something inane – like the last preposition you used or your resistance to the semi-colon. Sometimes there comes along a metaphor; it lets you roam a bit more easily.
All this, of course, happens as you write. After you are done, there is that sweet sense of accomplishment for having been a composer. No matter how the composition turns out…
