I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears. — Charles Bukowski, Consummation of Grief
I’d be lying if I didn’t question why I continue to write and share my material online. After all, it’s not like I’m selling anything. Also, I continue to question the need for a website, a Substack page and all those other (at times, unsocial) social media channels that I’ve played with and explored.
Perhaps the world would be better off without my explicit and at times narcissistic instructions.
As I’ve said before, all I long for is to live out a nice quiet life, and whilst I’ve certainly dialed down the amount I share and comment online, I know deep down that with Twitter about to become a very different place to the one I joined all those years ago, it wouldn’t take much to compel me to give up on the whole enterprise.
I wouldn’t stop writing though.
It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane since I first left legal practice in August 2010. In fact, if I could be bothered to look over the runes of the past 12-odd years, I’d see a plethora of my utterances without much deviation. And, in a way, even though there’s a part of me that regrets not forming something more book-like, it still pleases me, not in a congratulatory way but more auspicious than that, that I’ve managed to find a daily routine that has filled so many wonderful hours.
And for that, I shall be eternally grateful.
I know I’ve said something similar before but reneged on the better angels of my soul and continued down the road of writing online for fear (I guess) of being forgotten. But is that such a bad thing? I don’t know. I know what I stand for but these days if we don’t have 30,000 pairs of eyes upon us, we feel something is amiss. Why else would we have such an unhealthy fascination with the metrics? Imagine if we just wrote for pleasure and weren’t trying to sell something.
It’s at moments like this that I feel the draw of the writers I most admire: Charles Bukowski, Stephen Jenkinson, Dr Martin Shaw and Thomas Merton. I try to put myself in their shoes and imagine what it felt like and does feel like to craft such exquisite prose and poetry. What drew them to writing? Why that genre and not another? To be truthful, it doesn’t serve me half as well as I think for no other reason than imitation is fine to a point but, after a while, you can hear yourself simply repeating their words and that’s never a good thing.
Again, this is something else that I’ve opened up about; namely, the need to write more expansively and not be nailed to the cross of work vs. life, the Age of the Anthropocene and, more generally, my chagrin with the whole human race.
What would happen if I wrote about love, the higher self and nature?
As I sit here writing this post, alone with my thoughts, I have this felt sense that there is something left for me to do with what’s left of my life. I’d like to think it was a creative something but, hell, I’ve been saying that for so long too that even I am bone-weary tired of the need to pull the plug on paid work in favour of something more demanding of the soul.
Like my desire to escape the online world, I have to accept that if I truly was going to become an artist, I’d have pulled the pin by now.
In the end, all I can do is sit with whatever is arising and see what, if anything, materialises but one thing is for sure, the need to live out a nice quiet life will never leave me; and let’s just hope I don’t leave it too late.
For there’s nothing worse than too late.
Photo by Al Soot on Unsplash