Finding direction

“To write you first have to have something to say.”

I don’t remember where I first came across this sage piece of wisdom, but it has held true over the years. It explains the rush of poetry I produced in my youth and even why I stopped writing in my early adulthood.

Seems I always had something I wanted to say when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s and then life evolved and the follies of youth had to be put aside and I stopped having something to say, or more accurately I stopped letting myself have something to say. Now as I’ve travelled through life and age and wisdom have caught a hold of me, I find myself more often with questions to ask or directions to explore than answers or opinions to give.

I’ve let go of the arrogance of youth where I thought I knew everything and embraced knowing that no matter how much I learn I still have so much more I could learn. Life in all its varied shades of gray is a melting pot of answers and I often find myself stewing in the possibilities instead of choosing a direction in which to focus.

This can make it hard to pick something to say. How do you choose what story to tell? How do you pick just one simple truth to impart, or mistake to highlight? How do you separate all the entangled lines of experience to follow a single journey and make your point?

I think in my search to discover life’s mysteries I’ve forgotten that sometimes the simple messages are the most profound and that it also doesn’t always have to be profound. Truth is found in the risks we take and the lessons we learn in the discovery.