Commitment or surrender?
One of the best pieces of advice that I have ever learned about writing is that there should never, ever be a calendar anywhere in the room in which you are writing. Not even on your laptop. Put a piece of scotch tape over the date on the lower right hand corner of your computer screen. Throw your goddam wristwatch away! Burn your calendars.
Writing and linear time should never occupy the same room. Writing is going beyond time and time is what hinders writing. Writing is the act of breaking the shackles of time. Time is the shackles that prevent us from entering… The Timeless Zone. That is the zone from which the purest writing emerges.
When we are marking Xs on our calendars we are marking days until we are released from the prison of time. Just throw the fucking calendar away!!!!
Time is quantitative and writing is qualitative. The two have no business being in the same room.
We can commit to time or we can commit to going beyond time. We can choose what we get stuck in or what endless universe we release ourselves into.
Commitment is seen as the anchor for good writing. It is also the foundation of countless unhappy marriages. Being committed also means ending up in the looney bin.
What is ten thousand times more powerful than commitment is surrender. What is more powerful than being a middleman for a muse is BEING THE MUSE. Almost every writer strives to connect to a muse outside of themselves rather than to the muse THAT THEY ARE!
Writing is not a process of committing. It is a process of surrendering. Instead of committing to a muse that we place outside of ourselves or to illusory concepts of time, we must let all that go. Everything we need to write is located within our hearts. And every idea we attach to good writing is an obstacle to that infinite bank of stories. The more we surrender and the more we release everything and go deeper and deeper into our own hearts, the more the writing will spew forth.
Instead of committing, release. Release everything that blocks that gusher from gushing forth. Release yourself from every expectation… Release yourself from all your commitments. Release yourself from time. Release yourself from everything and anything and you will bring forth a gusher of liquid gold. Commit yourself to finding that gusher and you will never find it as quickly as you will by surrendering to it. It is right there inside you. Surrender to it. Allow it to come forth without condition. That is when you discover the writer that you are. And that is when you discover who you are.
