The joy of deliberately not writing

I’m just back from a three-week road-trip through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and back home to England. So many miles – 2,500 in total. So many lakes, forests, beaches, towns, cities, people. So much art, culture, and music (we stopped for a few days at a festival in Gothenburg). So much inspiration. So much time to think and reflect – and, of course, to write.

Yet I didn’t write a single word. Literally, not one. Until this week’s Dark Angel’s poetry gathering, I didn’t even pick up a pencil. I got back three days ago and writing this now on my laptop still feels physically awkward.

For me, this lack of writing while travelling isn’t unusual. When I go away, the first two things I pack are my running kit and my writing gear. Much thought goes into which running kit and how much writing gear. And then I never use any of it. Unless I’m travelling with Dark Angels, in which case I always try to write something, if only pour encourager les autres.

Normally, I’d berate myself about the lack of writing all trip. If you love writing so much, why are you not writing now, when you have all the time in the world? Writing then becomes something I’m always just about to do, but never quite do. It’s not a healthy way to be, surely?

This time was different. I’d purposely decided not to write. I’d chosen to make this summer road trip a kind of writing fast. The experiment: what would it be like to intentionally not do something that I’ve done or thought about doing pretty much every day for the last 25 years or more? The two notebooks and minimal pencil selection that I did take were for emergency purposes only. 

Initially, the experiment idea felt horrifying. I need to write, don’t I? Joan Didion said “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, so stopping for a bit would be like…. a kind of death. I didn’t want to die before seeing the Nordic Watercolour Museum.

How did it go? At first, there were acute pangs of withdrawal – going for a walk without a pencil felt wrong. Next came an unpleasant sense of absence, disconnection; a kind of restlessness. But after a few days I settled into a beautiful mood of ease, a gentle release.

That sounds like the journey of a recovering addict. Perhaps it is. Our relationships with the things we love can become twisted into addiction, I find. We become dependent on them. Needy about them. Terrified about not getting enough of them. Believing if we could just get more, and more, and more everything would be better, or at least ok.

And thus the simple and joyous activity of threading words together on a regular basis and sharing them with the world, which has such potential to expand our selves and enrich our lives, can make us tetchy, petty and small when we cling to it so tightly. As Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘each man kills the thing he loves.’ (When I say ‘we’ I mean ‘I’, but maybe it’s the same for you? Or maybe it’s a bit like that sometimes?)

The writing fast became a lovely experiment in letting go. With it came the realisation – the remembering – that I can still live an awake life in accordance with Mary Oliver’s three instructions – “pay attention, be astonished, tell about” – but the telling doesn’t have to come in the form of writing, or not always, or not immediately.

The things that matter are the noticing and the connection. I can chat with a Danish campsite owner about the joy of seeing the horizontal lightening of a wild electrical storm intersect the northern lights (I slept through it); I can laugh with the nude German camper as he fails to shoo the nipping ducks away from his flacid white breakfast sausage (not a euphemism – check out Weisswurst); but I don’t have to worry about writing it all down.

The irony, of course, is that I am writing it down now. Writing is a wonderful form of noticing and connection. I’d say the best I know. The fast helped me appreciate how much I love writing, and that I love it most when I hold it with some lightness. This is a lovely thing to know.

Neil

p.s. the photo shows our van parked for the night by a lake in Sweden. Lake Öresjön, to be precise, as there are rather a lot of lakes in Sweden, I noticed.

p.p.s I sailed home on an Irish ferry called the Oscar Wilde, which is a lovely coincidence. We also share a birthday, me and Oscar, which is also lovely, but not relevant.

p.p.s Having just finished writing this note, I’m suddenly reminded of something the writer James Thurber told the Paris Review:

“​​I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing something.’”

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If you’d like a little more writing, noticing and connection in your life, or are on a fast you want to break, we’ve got some lovely creative opportunities coming up in the coming weeks and months. Details here. If you’re not sure whether these are the right opportunities for you, maybe soften your grip on the need to know and come along anyway. Remember, writing is just lovely. And I make no apologies for the number of times that word has appeared in this note.