Day 305, January 14, 2020

What Came Next 

Today's soundtrack: Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No. 1, David Oistrakh, violin

I woke up last night with the first sentence of a new short story running through my head. It was so vivid and clear, I couldn't fall back asleep and kept adding to the story bit by bit, until I had a full paragraph running through my head. I was worried if I fell asleep I would forget it all, so I painstakingly typed it out on my phone because I was too lazy and cold to go downstairs to work on the computer or get my notebook. That worked, and in an odd reversal of patterns, I spent my breakfast transferring what I had typed into technology into my analog notebook. 

This used happen more often for me, the arrival of a line, a sentence, when I was writing fiction regularly. They are amazing sentences because attached to just a handful of words is the tendrils of everything else in the lives of these characters. That one sentence then gives way to the first paragraph, and then that becomes a page, and so on. I haven't had time to return to the story since breakfast, but maybe it will accompany me for breakfast tomorrow as well. It is marvelous to have something like that spill out of one's self so suddenly. 

I wonder about that sensation, that moment when ideas and creativity are just flowing and it feels wonderful. That also happened in a meeting today with two of my colleagues. How fantastic is that sensation? And, sadly, so rare! 

Except, I don't think it is so rare for people who teach in the classroom or work with students one on one, there is something of that exciting energy, when synapses are crackling and popping in the air, or when a student, even over Zoom, feels a sense of connection and possibility. It is a wonderful and lucky thing to be a part of that experience. 

That sensation is a part of what compels us continue in the work we do. There is a reward center in the brain that is triggered by creativity, discovery, connection, and transformation. It feels good. 

And yet, it is something we so easily lose, so easily forget. It is so easy to not write a story. It is so easy to not do something that stretches our tendrils to consider different perspectives, different opinions, different lived and experienced realities. My advisor, Julie Graham used to talk about how there are always multiple realities existing simultaneously, that each person's life experience shapes a different reality that they are experiencing the same moment that you are, and it is no less valid or real.

That's something to meditate on in the context of the MAGA insurrection. 

For some people, a different reality is what exists for them, and making it more real is what brings them pleasure, it is what triggers their reward center.

Perhaps.

That makes me a little queasy. 

So I prefer to return to the earlier thought, the sentence full of promise and possibility that was thumbed into my phone in the dark of the pre-dawn, and left me lying there until morning thinking of what came next. And what came next after that.

Take care and be well,

Leo