It’s really hard to write. I’m traveling with my youngest.
I hated leaving home. And yet I felt stuck.
Stuck.
Not a good place to be as a writer.
And yet it happens.
I don’t experience writer’s block, as much as encountering periods wherein it is just hard to write. I lack the stamina to even get started.
I feel no excitement.
Ideas for a new story, ever how short, evade me.
Perhaps this is writer’s block.
Perhaps writer’s block presents in many ways oftentimes unique to our personalities and vulnerabilities.
Every writer’s greatest fear is losing the ability or more so the compulsion to write.
And yet to do so takes us into excruciatingly honest and painful places.
Why do we do it?
Our answers are as varied as the needs, sufferings and joys that drive us.
Our personalities and histories play equally important roles.
And then there is the sheer constancy that writing provides.
Travel takes me out of my comfort zone.
Unlike many writers I do not need to leave home to write.
The noise of family and phones ringing does not distract me. Rather they become a background against which I steel myself to the task.
The daily round of duties and responsibilities ties me to the words and carve out as I sit to my computer.
Traveling makes me think of home, what I miss, what strengthens me, what gives me hope.
Against the differences in setting, environment, culture and creation, I see who I really am.
I am too fat, need to lose weight, have not lost as much as I hoped.
Against the differences I encounter in others I see me, uncensored, rough and without edits.
Travel is much like writing.
Both take me out of myself so that I encounter who I truly am.
How wonderful?
And how sad that I must leave myself to see the nature of me.
Perhaps this is simply life, as it is, as we wish it were not.
And yet what can we do?
Write…and travel…
only to write…and travel some more.