Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Do something that scares you. Live a little. Start before you’re ready. You’ll never be ready.
I was delighted to find this note in the drawer of the table I was working at today.
I recently had someone ask me a terrifying question. He asked, if you could do anything what would you do?
And the part that was scary wasn’t that it was the first time anyone had ever asked me that.
It was that he was serious.
In her most recent book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, best-selling author Dani Shapiro writes,
When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again.
I am sitting in a café with large windows, light streaming in, jazz music playing. At this point, I have an idea, a working title, a little piece of inspiration. I am starting over again. I don’t know how this piece will turn out but I do know that before I leave the cafe I’ll have a first draft.
There is a little bit of uncertainty – roughly 45 minutes of uncertainty – involved in writing this post. And that amount of uncertainty is manageable for me. Bite sized.
