If you can get past my goofy title, I’d like to describe something that I’m starting to believe in more than ever: you can write your destiny into existence. You can write what will be in order to, well, will it to be.
I’m obviously not talking about anything new here in the abstract, but in a concrete, practical, actual-lived-experience sense I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon something genuinely extraordinary.
I’m sure a simple Google search would unearth many books and blogs describing exactly what I’m talking about, but I can do that for almost anything—it doesn’t mean much without actually trying.
The most common example comes from morning pages, and sometimes it sneaks up on me. I might write about wanting to publish more for months in my journal, and suddenly (hello) here I am.
I wrote about starting my Point Reyes project for months, too, and suddenly found myself slogging along the sand under a hot California sun. I’d thought about similar projects for years beforehand.
It almost sounds romantic, but the truth is actually closer to being annoyed into action. There are only so many times that you can write about what you want before you have to do it (to shut yourself up).
Another example: writing a case study before actually doing the work. Writing for an imagined audience (without context on the problem or sympathy for the constraints) created instant clarity and urgency.
It felt so simple, and at the same time profound. Problems that I might have worked on in the abstract suddenly had to become concrete, plain-english language, and the solution started to emerge.
Again, almost poetic—but the reality is that I didn’t have the patience to stop my flow of writing, and so I had better figure this thing out fast. Write, get stuck, make. Repeat until problem solved.
Even this blog has made me start doing things that I had thought about for a long time before starting, and now seem to happen with a strange sort of ease—as though I’m writing them into existence.
I’ll end by saying that my favorite (related) thing about this blog is that I absolutely did not search the web before writing this, because I might not have written it if I did. Instead, I just started writing.