It is Saturday morning. I take a second-rate, hour-long run, a slog through thickly damp air and pervasive disinclination. My breakfast is pedestrian in all respects. I sit at my desk and delay the inevitable, scrolling through social media sites, watching videos about heartwarming child adoptions, surprising military family reunions, and unlikely animal friendships. I read stories that are simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting, chock-full of pain, loss, redemption, and inspiration.
It is time to write my blog post, but my mind is empty of anything remotely creative. Every week for the past 18 months, ideas and storylines fluttered throughout my consciousness, mostly uninvited, during weekday runs and solitary dog walks. This week was dusty and barren, my imagination cloaked in stifling banality. I am stuck.
I have dozens of blog post ideas scratched on notepads and typed into my iPhone Notes app: watching a one-legged man in a wheelchair escorted by his attentive pit bull; a paperback book I owned in college showing up thirty years later in an European Airbnb; tossing grudges while throwing away clutter; how I think I’m busy until I found a calendar from 1996; the searing and ruthless political environment on Facebook; the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. The list goes on and on, endlessly arcing past the suffocated segment of my personal creativity.
I consider, and cast aside, essay themes as quickly as I sort dirty clothes on laundry day. The subjects are too trite, sentimental, or emotionally troubling, or they are obviously hackneyed, or blatantly controversial in an electrified national election season. That ever-present pull to create, to examine, or to amuse is not just elusive or inaccessible, it is non-existent, erased from memory.
I quell the rising panic that emerges within me: I am done, there is no more, my enthralling creative journey has ended long before I contemplated. I research writer’s block on the internet and read articles explaining that apathy, anxiety, and self-doubt are at its core. I briefly ponder what comes next. I assumed that my passion for writing was a fundamental facet of what drives me. But now that desire is truncated, an unanticipated impediment cresting an unforeseen hill.
I sit, sullenly, shoulder to shoulder with tedium and frustration.
And then it comes to me: this is not just where I am; it is exactly where I am supposed to be. I breathe deeply and accept feelings of discouragement, disquietude, and indecision. I allow myself to wonder, without judgment, of what has brought me to this point and without impatience about when it will end. It is not about selecting a trail through a thicket or deciding on a route through the trees. It is about occupying space while worries and burdens scurry past me, tripping in their eagerness to gain ground.
The words of poet George Gordon Byron come to me: There is pleasure in the pathless woods. And so, I sit and wait, watchful, soothed by a breathless forest.