Someone told me recently to just let my words bleed out on the page -- as if that was a good and practical thing (admittedly I was working on a piece-for-hire that I had negligible interest in writing at the time.).
The idea left me with images of me lying in a pool of swollen and red words, sentences tattered from emotion, and a completed piece bereft of life. "He was a good author," someone would say, "It's too bad it had to end this way."
Really? Should I bleed out on a page? Or should I find the right vehicle, the write platform for my words? So that instead of needing a bloodletting, the words would effortlessly sparkle out of me and carry me to the stars?
Bloodletting or a spirited ride to the stars?
Is there really anything to think about?
I think that finding the right vehicle for life -- whether we're writers or mathematicians or beauticians or computer programmers -- is the most important task we have. It's easy to find a niche or group of like-minded people; we do that by getting jobs all the time. And because it's a job and we're getting paid, then we have it all. But all we really have is a niche.
How often did or do you find yourself just dying to get out of bed so you can go to your niche? Be with the people who do what you do? Last year, a CBS poll found that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work.
That statistic leads me to think that, in general, the masses are just trying to figure out a way to bleeding out on the page! Just make it through another day. Convinced of the words of people like my mother (who was a master of settling for what society was best for her): Just be glad you have a job!
Instead of just bleeding out on the page -- or finding a way to put a band-aid on an unpleasant life situation -- I suggest we all find that rocket ship of inspiration that will fly us out of Dodge. That each of us do what American mythologist and author of
The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell suggested: F
ollow your bliss. Campbell wrote:
"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."
Don't settle for the bloodletting theory of doing things, the I just want to shut my eyes and get this over with notion.
Find that something that will not only cause you to spring out of bed in the morning; it will hoist you off this ordinary planet and push you into the stars.
