Shanzhai Lu

I first wrote this back in May. It was inspired by reflections of my sister's life and death. A few months after her suicide in 2004, I found a journal she had kept during her depression. On a few pages she had noted the things she had said she wanted to do one day when she made enough money or had enough time.

Kind of sad that fear of not having enough held her back from doing things that would've given her more by way of meaning, purpose and balance.

Pushing Proverbial Pencils

I don’t care who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done or what you’re doing now.

We all have stories in our lives we want to write. Big life changing ideas in our minds of things we want to do one day. Things we’d like to be doing now but don’t have the time or resources for. Things we’d do in a heartbeat if things were different for us or if the opportunity presented itself.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around and tell ourselves we’ll get to writing one day.

And then time passes.

And we’re too busy with the life we have to live to start writing the story of our life we want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves that now’s not the right time to start writing the story of our life because maybe our pencils aren’t sharp enough. Yea, that’s it. We need more time to sharpen our pencils. We want the story to be perfect.

And then more time passes.

And we tell ourselves the time isn’t right to start writing the words we really want to say because we’re too busy living the life we THINK we’re supposed to live in order to eventually get around to living the life we really want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves we have to make more money and gain more experience in order to start writing the story of our life.  Besides, we haven’t found the right paper. We don’t even know if we have the right pencils. We want it to be perfect. We’re not ready to start writing yet.

And then more time passes.

And our pencils start getting old

…along with the ideas we wanted to write about.

And the reality of this sets in along with the regret.

And we pound the desk real hard out of frustration.

And some pencils fly off the desk in different directions.

One lands in the trash can next to us.

Another rolls under our desk and out of sight.

Another falls straight down and breaks its sharpened tip as it hits the floor.

And then more time passes.

And then life passes.

…leaving sharpened pencils and perfect blank pieces of paper strewn around a desk with a now empty chair.

Sad thought? Yes.

The end? No.

Just start writing.

Anything. Unrehearsed. Off the top of your head. In the direction you want to go.

Complete with typos and bad grammar.

And go ahead and talk out loud as you write so people can hear you. The story gets even better that way.

See, the problem is — and the problem that Susie had — is thinking that the story of your life needs to be written by you alone in the form of a big huge book that no one’s ever going to buy, read or share with others if it’s not perfect. So you proofread it in your mind indefinitely. And the world misses out.

Pushing pencils around a desk is a waste of time.

Just start writing.

Now.

Proofread later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do. And so do you.

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