Why I Bother

Some days it's hard to get motivated to write, suspecting that it doesn't matter what I write or how well (or poorly) I do it. There was a time when I had visions of publication, or at least the idea that I could accomplish something of somehow lasting significance. But even back then I suspected I was chasing an illusion. One of my favorite poets has long been Stephen Spender, and one of my favorite of his poems is "What I Expected." He writes that

What I expected, was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I rest long.

What I had not foreseen
Was the gradual day
Weakening the will
Leaking the brightness away,
The lack of good to touch,
The fading of body and soul
Smoke before wind,
Corrupt, unsubstantial.

The wearing of Time,
And the watching of cripples pass
With limbs shaped like questions
In their odd twist,
The pulverous grief
Melting the bones with pity,
The sick falling from earth -
These, I could not foresee.

Expecting always
Some brightness to hold in trust
Some final innocence
Exempt from dust,
That, hanging solid,
Would dangle through all
Like the created poem,
Or the faceted crystal.

I know now that nothing is "exempt from dust," that nothing "hangs solid," that there is no lasting finality. Knowing that, it's hard to keep from wondering why bother to do it at all. Why spend time and toil on something that in the scheme of things, means nothing?

But even as I write this, at the risk of touching on some deep darkness, I sense the answer. It's not really the writing that matters, though it's possible sometimes to write something that can make a reader pause and feel touched at some level. It's not a seeking of praise or lucre, not anymore. But what does matter is the writing itself, the doing, the edits and re-edits, the unexpected sense of joy that arises when I create a sentence or phrase that makes me pause, that matters not only because I like it but even more because I didn't know I had that within me.

It's that flow of creative energy that matters to me now, not the result, in the same way that a river is not defined by the water that flows through it or even by the shapes it carves in the landscape, because in the fullness of time, those shapes, those banks, will be lost, will merge into some future world. And though it's possible some future geologist or archeologist will be able to re-imagine that river, it will never flow again.

In the same way, my stacks of written stories, and my even more expansive set of unprinted electronic files, are out there in the world, at least for now, but even as I read them -- or on the rare occasions that others do -- they aren't real anymore. If I've done it right, there may be some residual value, but only that it might trigger myself or that rare reader to reflect at least momentarily on the wonder and mystery and simple being of the world in which, temporarily, find ourselves.

But what mattered is ultimately lost, the same way those rivers have run dry.

But it matters enough that the rivers did flow, and it matters to me that I have been immersed in the flow, that I have, however briefly, found myself in the endless moment of the now.