I’ve been trying to do this one thing ever since I was born or at least ever since I can remember consciousness. I’ve been trying to do the right thing. For a huge chunk of my childhood I thought I was pretty damn good at it, although a child who is doing the right thing doesn’t use words like damn...at least not in my community of origin. And by “right” I mean I followed all the rules, kept my mouth shut, listened carefully, worked hard to make my parents proud and as much as possible didn’t rock any boats. Looking back on my childhood, I can’t think of any boats that tipped over, real or metaphorical, due to my rocking. And this served me well for my childhood, for the most part.
And yet, as I look back, I was drawn toward doing the “write" thing from the start as well. My dad used to tell the story of how on my first day of life he held me up to his shoulder for a cuddle. He was wearing one of those collared work shirts with stuff in the front pocket. When he pulled me away and lifted me with arms stretched out, I had grabbed a letter out of his pocket and was still gripping it. My baby book says that Dad thought I might be a writer some day. Maybe instead of a pastor he was psychic. Did he really know me that well on my first day? It turns out he wasn’t wrong.
Doing the right thing got old really fast when I went from being a deep-thinking child to a deep-thinking teenager. That’s when I discovered being right and doing right can’t guarantee happiness. And that’s when writing first became very clearly the right thing for me to do. Writing in a journal kept me out of trouble and brought me a lasting friend, myself. Writing also got me the grades I wanted and gave me a chance to do something to contribute to the community. I edited my first news letter when I was 15. I loved it.
In between those first gratifying write moments and now I lost my way a few times, falling off the writing(journals are your best friend) path and getting back on the righting (that is tip no boats) path. It has never stopped being a struggle for me to want to do the right thing, sometimes at great cost to my happiness. Those are hard lessons to learn but the doing-it-right path is not a righting place for me. It is a self-deprecating place. In contrast, if I just write, just give myself to the words and the spirit, yes spirit that flows through them, I find I do more right than not. Writing brings me joy and others a perspective they haven’t considered. Sometimes writing exposes the dream within and sometimes it invites color and laughter. It is so clear to me now that the right thing for me is to write.
So now, I stand looking toward a new year, which is only a few weeks away. On an almost daily basis I am reminded that life is short, that it is not worth it to waste time trying to do the right thing. On an almost daily basis, I find a write thing to do and it centers me. It seems there is only one right thing to do. And that is, find more time to write and share that writing and less time to think about being or doing anything else.
