Choosing your own life
So yesterday I spent a bunch of time beating myself up for writing that blogpost. For whining. But as often happens, my whining elicited a flurry of emails of support and affirmation and encouragement. In one, several passages from Thomas Merton, including this one:
“The purpose of education is to show us how to define ourselves authentically and spontaneously in relation to our world—not to impose a prefabricated definition of the world, still less an arbitrary definition of ourselves as individuals. The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it: that is, of the people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions … is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of ‘choice’ when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.” -Thomas Merton
It would be really cool to be the novelist I dream of being — the Edmonds, Washington, version of Anne Tyler, or a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners historical novelist (since that seems my genre) like Geraldine Brooks. But getting to wake each morning and write, that’s the number one, real dream. That’s what I’m doing. Okay, and hanging out with Emma and Mom…and staying married.
Being “fully and more humanly alive….[making] a lucid and conscious use of [my] freedom.” That’s the goal.
“The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one will publish it, and, if they publish it, maybe no one will read it.” 
I can write anywhere. I made up the names of the characters on a sick bag while I was on an airplane. I told this to a group of kids and a boy said, “Ah, no, that’s disgusting.” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t used the sick bag.”
“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” –Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby