∀ Seed leaders making roots rise, Euralis Semences
¶ Prompt from Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write.
Look over your life. Find a choice you made for yourself that had a positive outcome. “This assignment,” says Julia, “is a celebration both of freedom and of courage.”
I’m hella running out of interest in myself — I want to meet new people, taste new foods, see new mountains, and see my old dreams as reality for a change.
Cameron writes in her Roots chapter that when a writer disconnects from the world, his writing feels disconnected, when a writer escapes the world with a narrow pretense to write then the writing become narrow. Being disconnected, narrow, or even boring, at some of the great fears for the artist. Our work immortalizes moments; dare we immortalize stagnation? How we break free is by living life. Earlier this week I read this question: “How can you LIVE a story as interesting as the ones on the page?” Which reminded me of a quote Franklin once say, “Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.” All in all, the point of all these exercises is to merge life and writing to create, yup, a writing life. Integrate into life. And it will respond with writing. Something like that.
To answer the assignment, one decision I made for myself despite the expectations I and others had on me was, I’ll never forget, sitting in my aunt’s living room with the United Airlines page open. Houston to Buenos Aires. I hesitated. I debated. Why had I said no to that radio sales job? Why had I spend the last two months traveling? Wasn’t it high time I settled down? Twenty-four seems so old at twenty-four. That United page stared back at me. Suddenly my cousin got back home from work — an internship at a hospotal. She would graduate next year. She had a quick answer to my questions.
“Just do it.”
I am happy to say that getting out and going in that 2015 was one of the best decisions of my life. Going to Argentina was going back to my roots. It was a personal decision, but what made it great were the friends I made, the family I reconnected with, and the strangers I encountered.
(My list is in a shoe box.)
