Reflections after a workday
Writing without inhibitions can be one of the fullest forms of happiness.
When I started The Buendía Post in September, I already knew I would publish in both English and Spanish (or Castilian, as it’s called in Venezuela). I think and dream in both languages, and although I still prefer Spanish, my daily life, my work obligations, and my reading and media habits have made me live much of the last twenty-eight years in English.
I decided not to announce it from the beginning because... I really don't know why. I have not followed the advice they give to “successfully” publish something like The Buendía Post: ask yourself who the audience will be, imagine what value proposition you’ll offer to them, meet those expectations, write frequently and consistently, and so on and so forth. My attitude consisted (and I think it will for some time) of “I’ll take life as it comes.”
I decided to start in English and with the chronicle: English is the most difficult language for me, and the chronicle a genre that I haven’t practiced much but I really like. I wanted to combine the easy with the difficult: a genre that I could enjoy with the language that would require me to work harder. I thought it was an effective way to warm up, to move my writing muscles stiffened by disuse and neglect. My only goal was to defeat my inertia, or rather, to change my inertia from rest to movement. Starting to write was the initial push to change my state.
What I didn't imagine (what I didn't know how to imagine) was how much I was going to enjoy it. Yes, it's extra work on top of my full-time job, but the joy of writing has become my sole reward. “Writing is its own reward,” they say Henry Miller said; I prefer Anne Lamott’s more elaborate version, which I even recorded in some note (from Bird by Bird; I didn't write down the page number, and I'm too lazy to look it up):
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do — the actual act of writing — turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
Writing without inhibitions can be one of the fullest forms of happiness. It generates the energy it requires. It creates the ideas that feed it. It completes the arguments that we glimpse. It organizes the chaos that intimidates us. To write is to inform our experience of the world. Even if it doesn’t serve any other purpose, it might at least help us navigate the river of existence without being swept by the muddy waters of daily events.