Space

This week I've been listening to Pema Chodron's CDs on 'Getting Unstuck', in which she talks about the technique of observing thoughts, identifying the 'sticky' emotions at the heart of thoughts and then coming back to the breath or the now, in order to process that emotion.

I can see that the whirling of thoughts or day-dreaming in itself is a form of numbing-out. Yet as a writer this type of numbing-out is actually the source book. However Pema's teachings are equally useful to the writer because instead of staying in thought, we re called back to the now through meditation and at this point there is the opportunity to pick up the pen and process the drama of day-dreaming into a physical active form, ie. writing.

It's a 3 act play if you like. 1. Think. 2. Bring the essence of it down to the present. 3. Process. Then the writer must add the fourth step - Write. It is then the foremost priority to create Step1. by making sufficient space for thinking and meditation. This is the aspect so misunderstood by non-writers, who say, "Why don't you just write?" and they watch expectantly as you struggle to move your pen. But of course the pen doesn't move because the pen has nothing to say by itself. First there must be the space, and it is the space that is so difficult to create in the average working day.

Professional writers then have an advantage. They do one of two things. 1. They are so well practised at thinking, finding the emotion and processing that they are within a few minutes able to go straight to writing. 2. Because the professional writer has no other job to do in any given day then when they are not writing they can be quietly thinking so that when they return to their desk they are ready to start writing again.

It is not then solely that the amateur writer (who also works in another field) fails to interrupt their thought and bring it down to the now to process but also that often they never even start thinking, so taken up as they are, with the demands of other people and of the world in general.

This then is why the yearning for space and silence, a constant theme in modern living, is also at the heart of yearning for creativity.