Commitment, The Number 8, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity…

A novel, the first draft of which I wrote 8 years ago, has come together.

Wow!

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m so excited and obsessed with this revision, like with none other.

It’s such a wonderful feeling to have something that you’ve been holding, and for such a long time, on which you’ve worked so hard, and then realizing it just wasn’t right, you laid aside.

I logged 6 revisions during this time. Yet always at the end, the pieces didn’t fit. I had yet to display my best work on this story.

Sometimes the universe delivers us the idea for a creation for which, despite our fervor and commitment to carrying out, we lack the skills to bring the creation into greatest illumination.

And so we wait.

Like a diamond beneath the earth, our work needs to undergo the pressure of time–time in which we pursue other smaller goals, the working through and accomplishment of which develops the skills within us to carryout this larger work.

According to Richard Panek, the author of, The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes, after receiving in a dream the idea for his Theory of Relativity Einstein then had to go back, and while employing great intricacy and detail, study the math he had been able to skip during college. It took eight years to accomplish this.

A faculty member of the Goddard MFA Program in Creative Writing, Panek shared this in an essay given at the outset of one of our brief residencies the signaled the beginning of the semester.

The number 8 turned sideways reflects the symbol for infinity.

An infinity of universes reside within our body and soul.

The ones we choose to bring into physical form, as with transferring the stories birthed through our imagination onto paper or electronic screen, require the physicality of applying ourselves to the task of writing them.

We can only do so much in our lives, can devote our days and hours to a few accomplishments if we are to do anything well.

What in your story asks of you time for gestation within you?

What are some things you can or would like to do?

How might you nurture this fertile time?

Any books you’d like to read?