The Footprints I’ve Left Behind Me
My friend, Bethany, says that all art is temporary. Consider, she says, the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of the sand mandala. Over hours of intense concentration a mandala composed of hundreds of symbols is painstakingly created from handfuls of colored sand. Once complete the mandala, with its meaning and beauty, is swept away, an acknowledgement that all things are transitory.
We create for the moment we’re in, a Now imbued with its particular emotions and thoughts. Those will change—most likely in the process of creating an expression for that state of being. This is why we can love our writing one day, while the next day not understand where the writing came from, let alone what it means.
Our instincts tell us to “fix it.” We review, rewrite, revise again and again, only to run into the same sense of having failed to capture the moment. We fix until revisiting the words leaves us appalled at the very sight of them.
This is why I’ve changed my tactic from expressing myself to deciding what skill or technique I want to improve in my current project. I work until I can learn no more from the project at hand. (Craft secret: focusing on any one writing skill elevates the writing as a whole.) Then I’m done.
I no longer want that future. That I didn’t see my wish fulfilled turned out a gift.
I changed.
At that point, I tend to throw it off the edge of the earth to find out if I’ve created wings that work. My four published novels could glide, but never gained altitude enough to escape gravity. They saw day—for a while—and then dropped from sight. All are out of print now (although there are hard copies around and on electronic book sites).
I don’t see this as a failure. In fact it is a happiness. All four were written at a juncture of my life when I wanted certain things for certain reasons. I no longer want that future. Life gifted me by denying my short-sighted hopes. I changed in what I wanted from writing.
Perhaps it’s best to let change happen and not take the result as measure of what must be fixed.
I feel as though I’m walking along an endless shoreline. Every so often I turn back to take in the view behind me. Part of that view is made of the footprints I’ve left behind. The line isn’t straight. I’ve wandered on occasion into the water. The line of footprints is broken, imperfect. I could run back to fix those broken stretches, but to do that is to run only back over ground I’ve covered.
The footsteps behind me are the proof of my progress through change. Nothing is wrong with them. I’m only further down the beach. I’ve come to accept that I’m walking on sand. Each step is its own mandala in time. Eventually, every step will be swept away. I will be left only the story of my journey. That is more than enough.
Writing Exercise
Write a story or unravel a memory—backwards. Start at the end and, in as much detail as you can muster, rewind the film. The challenge here is to keep it a story. Bonus Points: Story is, among other things, a way of marking time. For us, time moves only with a sense of forward. So, is it even possible to tell a story backwards?
Photo: Jason Coudriet via Unsplash