Today I have got the awful feeling they call Writer’s Block.
This is where you are sitting in a stuck sort of daydreaming way unable to think of a single interesting thing to write about, a bit like history lessons at school.
Some days I can hear a bird singing and be blown away by it, and absolutely full of the urgent need to share it and write about it, to see if I can get other people to hear the sound in their heads and feel joyful about it the way I do.
Other days – and this is one – the New York Philharmonic could assemble in the nude in my back garden and play a newly arranged version of the Rites of Spring, and I would glance out of the window and just feel mildly surprised. Actually, that isn’t quite true. I would look out of the window and feel worried about the lawn which already needs reseeding quite badly enough without an entire string section digging their pointy bits into it and making it muddier than it is already.
I shouted at Mark about the block feeling, so that he would know it was his fault and not mine, and he made sympathetic noises and went out to work to sit on the taxi rank to be a proxy for me so that I could get on with being uninspired all on my own apart from the dog, which was very kind but then I just felt guilty instead of inspired.
I was so bored I did some of next year’s tax return.
I looked at Facebook (in the name of research) to see if anybody had written anything inspiring so that I could comment on it but apart from Number One Daughter having her name on a chart of people who are worthy of international acclaim for being fit and wonderful there wasn’t anything. I had just eaten a chicken sandwich and a chocolate biscuit and resolved to do some exercise directly, but I haven’t done.
I was not miserable or grumpy or anything, just uninspired.
In the end I started carefully thinking about things to write and it’s funny how when you start concentrating on thinking about it properly there are just so many that you don’t know where to start.
A card came in the post this morning from somebody whose wife died last year, a beautiful picture of a leopard that he had painted himself and which had been the way he had always thought of his wife, beautiful and untamed and rare, and a lovely letter inside.
He is a quiet and unassuming man, has an unexciting job in something financial. He has glasses and a soft voice, and is not young any more: and he loved his wife with a glorious triumphant passion that inspired him to paint and write and yearn and celebrate. I was blown away by the hugeness of his feeling, and the beautiful art that had come out of it, and the thoughtfulness of his making it into a card and sharing it with people. When I have been a single parent it has taken all my organisational skills to make sure my offspring have remembered their P.E. kit and had their breakfast, never mind moved house, held down a full time job, managed two tiresome teenagers and in my spare time created beautiful art and sent it to people.
Then on my computer there was a message from a girl I knew when she was a teenager, who at that time had been completely heading for being a grown-up idiot and then an early corpse, because her father wasn’t around, and her mother died and nobody anywhere at all had cared, and who had been thoroughly groomed and manipulated and abused and dumped. She has pulled her life together all by herself, and learned to love herself and love other people and is well on her way to do university and a career in nursing. She has never once thought of herself as a victim, or complained about the unfairness of it all, and when things go well for her she is surprised and delighted and grateful to the universe. She has sat back and had a sensible think about what she could learn and do better, and I thought about her courage and determination and fantastic enthusiasm for life, and I was blown away by that as well.
Then I thought about Number One Daughter flogging herself to death to be the fittest person in the whole world, and her very patient husband trying not to mind having to have second place, and looking after Ritalin Boy while she lifts weights and jumps on and off boxes, and I thought how impressed with them both I am: and Number Two Daughter giving up smoking to raise funds for impoverished babies in Malawi, and I was blown away by all of them as well.
It’s a really good thing that the world is full of people doing creative and inspired and determined things. I am so very impressed by them all.
Especially because all I seem to be able to do is stare out of the window and not write things.
