On the Road Again 2014 #11

On occasion one of my students asks me what they can do to improve their writing. My standard answer is to write, and then write some more. I suggest to them that they should try to write 500 words a day. They don't have to be the best words or even the right words - editing comes later. But they need to get use to getting thoughts out of their heads and on to the paper. This suggestion is not something that I just made up. Other writers far more skilled than I can ever aspire to be have said it as well.

This summer I have not even come close to that daily goal. I am not too sure if there is a single reason for my lack of enthusiasm. Certainly not hitchhiking reduced the number of stories I could tell; it is hard to write when there are no grist for the mill. Many of the political stories I read in my daily ritual of scanning the news seemed repetitive and generally just boring.There was nothing that inspired me to write on a daily or even a weekly basis. Some of my lack of excitement is due to my sore back. I just did not travel as much as I have done in other years, I spent far more time this year sitting on a really nice lazy boy chair by the window in my son's living room and read. And I read more than I ever have before because i had access to an almost inexhaustible supply of books from my local library via the internet. In other years I have bought paperbacks from the local Sally Ann just down the street or from the Sassy Lion ( a charity thrift shop) that sells their books for three for a dollar. But in both stores the selection is limited and so I would ration my reading time. Having access to as many books to download and read as I wanted was like offering heroin to an addict. I consumed, I gorged, I luxuriated in the possibility of reading a book a day for weeks on end.

But as I sit here on the train just a few miles outside of Vancouver heading east (it left on time) I feel as if I spent part of the summer just a bit bored. I am not too sure if I accomplished very much. I did not do anything remarkable, I did not work hard at anything, in fact I invariably took the easiest possible route to anything/anywhere. And that just feels wrong.

It is not that I did absolutely nothing. I spent two days in Victoria, made two separate week long trips to Salt Spring Island, went camping for eleven days forty kilometers west of Gold River (in fact only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean) with my chosen family (Rainbow Family of Living Light) read a pile of books to my grandsons (actually the same few books read over and over and over again), went to the park numerous times to watch the same grandsons clamber over various pieces of playground equipment and started to carve what will be, when it is finished, my most complex walking stick. And all of that was wonderful

So perhaps it is the child in me, that part of my inner being who refuses to grow up, who still expects that every Christmas morning will be the most magical ever; that little boy who still dreams deep in the subconscious of being the hero who saves the day, and who still wants in spite of a sore back and a occasional activity limiting heart condition to be the center of every adventure story ever told - perhaps it is that person who feels disappointed or somehow cheated. Because this year it felt as I was, at best, only on the outer edges of the stories being shaped and told around the campfires of our souls.

P.S. for what it is worth that is 664 words