Like all of you, I’ve been trying to make sense of this time we’re living through. In the age of the pandemic, how is one to write?
I don’t know about you, but the past few weeks have made it pretty difficult to concentrate!
When I can, I turn to meditation and yoga. In these practises, the goal is not to get anywherebut to simply be with whatever is happening. These anchors have taught me that in times of turmoil, when my mind is racing, it’s okay to simply breathe deeply into the moment. In the big picture, there are few things we are able to control.
Writing as a practise can help create a stable, safe container for us to explore what is happening in our lives and in our world. As writers, we’re blessed with a set of tools that allow us to tap more deeply into the moment, even if that means finding time to sit still at our desk and daydream.
What does our writing practise look like during this time?
For some, it may mean writing as an anchor point to the day--setting aside fifteen minutes, a half hour or even several hours each morning to simply write without expectation. How can you let your writing into the curious, mysterious, scary part of this experience? What arises when you simply let your pen move across the page, without the pressure to create?
Perhaps your simply name your fears. Perhaps you focus on the sun streaming through your window, or the ladybug on the glass, and see where it leads you.
Or maybe you need a prompt. Here’s one for you.
On New Year’s Eve, I thought 2020 would be the best year ever. And now…
For others, it may be a time to hunker into your current project. Can the work itself be a healthy buffer? Can you treat your practise space as a place of ritual, a safe space to recharge?
And for others still, the tumult of the time will offer itself up as material. Some of the great writers of the English language—George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Hemingway, Joan Didion—used the upheaval and social disruption of their eras as an opportunity to see more clearly the world not as they had believed it to be, but as it was unfolding around them. We are living through such a time now. Read Virginia Woolf’s diaries of the Second World War and you’ll get a sense of how the world of the ordinary can be replaced by upheaval and the unknown seemingly overnight.
How can you use the time we’re living in to probe your own experience of living through it? What would a reader a hundred years from now want to know about this time?
Perhaps your own writing will provide the clues.