I’ve been waking up each morning to a battle between reason and purpose. The fact that I haven’t written here for the past month is evidence that the former has been winning out.
Approaching each day with reason is a pathway toward productivity. To complete each of these days means to cross off everything on my to-do list, to complete all social and professional transactions with a sense of accomplishment, maybe even make some headway toward my long-term projects. A day of reason is a day well spent.
There’s nothing wrong with a day with reason, but even still, I prefer a day of purpose. You know those days. They’re the ones when, regardless of what you had scheduled for the hours ahead, everything that was seemingly important gets brushed aside so that you can zero in on what truly matters. Sometimes, purpose arises in a time of crisis – a loved one you have to drop everything for, a fire you need to put out for the greater good, sometimes when you’ve been on such a roll with reason-filled days that you’ve neglected everything else and your body shuts down and forces you to get some fucking sleep. But in the best of cases, it’s when the muse shouts so loudly at you that the ideas can’t just sit in your mind and rot anymore. It’s when the spigot of purpose ruptures, it’s what some people call going back to the source.
Ideally, each day would be driven by purpose, but reason would still be sitting shotgun, maybe even take the wheel for short stints. In the best of circumstances, each task of my day is a stone to grasp as I climb toward my destination. When any task that’s a detour is, at the very least, treated as a garnish to allow space for surprise, as opposed to a distraction that leads me down an endless detour.
This year, I’m doing my very best to get back to my source as a writer. With the whirlwind of projects and passions I’ve picked up, sometimes it’s easy to forget that, without the word, I wouldn’t have had any of this. I heard recently that, when you write regularly, your brain gets rewired. My experience is a bit different. In the moments when I blow past all the distractions of reason, when I put value on the time spent toward piecing thoughts together simply to engage in the practice of piecing thoughts together, my brain doesn’t get rewired – it gets unplugged. My mind gets tuned in. I get free.