...just words...

I feel as though the worst part of any routine comes with trying to pick it back up again, once you've let it drop. I can't even begin to count the number of times that I have wanted to write something on this blank page...and then talked myself out of it.  I am, after all, a master of insecure self-talk...so it should come as no surprise that as often as I think of writing, I also think 'I've nothing worth saying that anyone wants to read'. 

So I've kept to myself and let the routine lag.  Instead of blogging, I've spent fall and winter curled up with pen and paper whenever the mood hits and the mind quiets.  These many months that have gone by have been filled with scribblings in a notebook instead of ramblings on the blog.  Because you see, whether it's good or bad or not worth the time it takes to read, I still feel the urge to write it out.  

Write it out.

I quite like the way that expression sounds. 

Write it out. Right it out.  

And maybe that's why I do it. Maybe the writing is the righting.  My chosen way of making sense of things.  Of coming to terms with the cards I'm dealt. Of accepting challenges. Of understanding defeat.  Of learning from my mistakes and shifting a bit so as not to repeat the pattern. 

It's as though any moments of wisdom are too ephemeral unless taken out of the mind and put on paper.  As though lead and ink give them substance...give them life.  In a world where information travels faster than light and one is constantly barraged with additional or extraneous input, writing it out  gives thought an anchor. 

Likewise, memory.  So much information to compartmentalize. So many items on the to-do list.  So many irons in the fire…racing from one thing to the next without time to process.  Write it out.  Put words to the time and space.  A notation on the calendar, or a scribble on a piece of scrap paper.  A grouping of meaningful, well-thought-out words that trigger the remembrance.  

I want to remember.  Preferably, I want to remember but not have to experience again.

 I want to be able to read through the previous chapters of my own unfinished story with the generosity and sympathy for that under-construction-girl-I-was, that comes with age or distance or experience.  That ability to look at past mistakes and feel instead of shame, understanding of how very easy it is to trip and fall.  I want to be reminded of where I was. Of how far I've come.  Of how those choices were right in their time and space but maybe wrong within the bigger picture.  Of why sometimes they weren't choices at all, but inevitable and unavoidable steps.   I want to be reminded that no matter how much I change, I equally stay the same.  That I can make better choices but the previous ones formed part of me.  That I can, at any given moment, be both the woman I am today and the girl I was then.  That the voice of each age I've been still resides within me.   I want to be kinder and gentler to the girl that I was, then I was with myself when I was she.  And I want the previous words that I've written to serve as a reminder to be gentler to myself in the here and now.

So I right it out by writing it out.

I've never been quite sure of whether it's 'I write because' or 'because I write'.