Just when you think you’re about to do something amazing, it all falls apart. You see the page that you’ve been waiting for so long to add words to, and then the words simply…don’t come. You try to add words, make some kind of progress to this project of passion. Once you finish…you delete the slop that just came from your fingers with the same revulsion as killing a cockroach.
Over and over again, you make these efforts. Over the days and weeks it becomes ever harder and harder for you to touch what you once loved. You feel…hopeless, maybe dejected, certainly out of it. You read these great works of old authors and feel the same despair their characters faced, the same highs of triumph and lows of defeat and the same hope that burns within their souls for a better future.
Everything seems there, ripe for the taking. You sit to write, and not a word can be seen upon the paper. There must be a missing ingredient, you think. There must be some component of these works of greatness and strength that simply isn’t captured in your writing, some core component missing. You internalize it; you begin to feel that maybe the emptiness within you is this same emptiness within your work. The key spark that brought such power is the same spark whose lack of presence in your body robs you of your power.
Let me tell you this; you are not alone. You are not the isolated case of great failure in the world, held back by the mere lack of some core part of who you are. Your heart is true, it is not the fault of some lack of willpower to discover or some missing component of your growth; it is simply the nature of things. Even in the best of times, we can fall to this enemy. The disruption of creation is our greatest fear, for it entails an end to our identity, and the mad scramble to recover it brings us to our knees in the effort. The pain of it is beyond what can be easily imagined, for it is a fundamental inability for our soul to find fulfillment. Yet, once all is considered, it is perhaps in the most likely and most elusive source that we may find the strength to continue in.
Love. Within love we can find our passion, our drive to continue and create and make better, and our desire for more. The desire to bring new into the world and to discover more within the worlds of our surroundings and our minds. With love, we can find those connections which are the foundation of the people who give our worlds their reality. In love, we can explore those conflicts and ideas which elevate writing into the realm of philosophies and lessons on the human condition.
Everything we create is finite. Yet, perhaps our desire to be remembered is the greatest that we have. The strong desire for more is a fundamental part of us, but is that desire bad? Even if it could be arrogant, is it wrong? I say no. It is simply a part of what makes us human, and that strong desire to be is perhaps the most powerful part of our race, for it gives us the hunger to conquer all in our path and bring a brighter future. The future may be dark, but only because our overpowering light has yet to touch it.
