Practice. It's a word that I find more and more on my lips and at the tips of my fingers as they ply the keyboard. It describes an activity that has brought me ever further satisfaction as a writer, even as it has guided me along the path of spiritual development. I believe it can do the same for anyone who "wants to write."
Practice is one of those magical words that can be either verb or noun. If I want to get to Carnegie Hall, as the old joke has it, I'll need to practice, practice, practice. And as anchors to the way I choose to live my life, I have a meditation practice and a writing practice. They feed each other.
The nexus between verb and noun is integral, then, but in the present context, it's the noun I want to think about.
First, the meditation practice. (Stick with me! I know there are many for whom the very word is anathema.) For many years I was reflexively turned off by the notion of sitting silently for more than a minute or two, at most. I told myself--persuasively, it seems--that I was incapable of meditation. My mind, I was convinced, was too busy, and my patience too thin. Meditation might be good for others, I magnanimously conceded. But for me it was too, well... passive.
Then, a dozen years or so ago, I found myself in one of those deep and painful situations with which life has a way of confronting us at precisely the wrong (right!) time and, with the help of a couple of good friends and advisers, I decided to give meditation a try. The instructions were simple: just breathe, I was told, and keep bringing the attention gently back to the breath, no matter what thoughts and feelings may come up.
Miraculously, it worked. In the course of time, I found not only immense solace in the great silences of mediation, but also a fine way to train the mind. It became my practice, every day, to sit--at first for ten or fifteen minutes, then fifteen or twenty, then thirty or forty-five. And breathe. No more, no less. And watch the breath as it enters and leaves the body. That simple--and that hard!
So one practice led to another. As a writer, I had always waited around for inspiration or editorial assignment to strike. But the practice of meditation created a kind of template for the writing practice I have come to pursue in recent years. The greatest temptation, at first, was to "write" during meditation. The writer's brain tends to seize upon this excellent opportunity to go to work and sketch out brilliant ideas and wonderfully-crafted sentences. It still does, even today, for me--though I have learned to more easily tell it "Not now," and expect it to obey.
Writing practice, as I think of it, is very different from that addiction that compels many writers to head for the computer every day and slog out their thousand, fifteen hundred, five thousand words. Practice is a discipline, a conscious choice rather than a compulsion. I was greatly aided in the development of my own writing practice by having stumbled, like Alice through the looking glass, into the blogosphere--an ideal place to practice, because the blog, by its very nature, promotes process over end product. And practice, by its very nature, is about process. It's a continuing--in fact a never-ending--build, a long, slow learning curve in which we are all perpetual beginners with no end in sight.
Just thinking of writing as a practice changes the way I write. Rather than a means for "expressing" some feeling or elaborating on some idea, it's a way of exploring what is happening within, a continuing adventure in awareness, a richly rewarding examination of this time I am given to spend on earth.
It was Socrates, was it not, who came up with the sage perception, centuries ago, that "the unexamined life is not worth living"? Together, these two practices, the meditation practice and the writing practice, provide me with the wherewithal to ensure that my life does not go unexamined. They provide an excellent escape from the dread "writer's block," because something is always going on inside, even if it's only dread. The question of "what to say" simply never arises, because nothing needs to be "said."
Many years ago I learned from a fellow writer an adage which has been my by-word as a writer ever since: How do I know what I think 'til I see what I say? Precisely.