Enjoy Your Choices or Find New Ones

Enjoy Your Choices or Find New Ones Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Rumi I saw this quote, pasted it here, and did away with the editorial I had written for this week. The quote prompted a spark such that I had to stop what I was doing and write. The idea is controversial, but thats fine. You can read it for its good intention, or twist it into something else. Its totally up to you. The world is in love with writing. Its organic (or should be). Its a tool we can put into practice girl with apples on her hands simply Other than run, what energy can you expend so simply and feel its rewards so intimately upon its completion? So, when you find yourself grumbling about rejection, fussing about yet another blog post, scrambling to understand the best way to use social media to make your writing salable, stop and thinkdo you really want to do this? How dare I challenge your skills, your mission, your ability to tell stories? I dare to We fuss about the bad writing that makes money and the good writing thats ignored. We fanatically hunt for the best tricks, how-tos, and secrets to writing well, organizing our time, or getting published. The excellent writers, the names that slide off your tongue like your favorite television show or family recipe, dont do any of this. They simply write. They write like their life depends on it. They write because its what they love. They dont care about the odds, the obstacles, the naysayers or the paradigm shifts of New York publishing. They thrive on their words and feed from their stories. To them, difficulty is just todays challenge to the same end to write for readers. There are no excuses about lost time, family obligations, short income, or Internet speed. They dont wake up and decide whether they feel like it. They rise eager to return to the page, regardless ofthe environment or issues of the day. Its what they do. Its what you ought to be doing . . . assuming that writing is your calling. What a miserable existence trying to force yourself into a calling, like choosing to be a minister without being beckoned Give yourself permission to step away from writing and find that other calling you are shirking. Imagine the joy youre missing, the thrill youre pushing aside because you think you want to be a writer. You only have one life, and its best you find the right fulfillment for those short years you have on this earth. Its okay not to be a writer. Its not okay to spend your life struggling to be something youre not. But if you are indeed hell-bent on being a writer, just do it.