Writing Anyway

I had big plans to post every day last week.

You know what they say, though: "The best laid plans of Emily sometimes get steamrolled by the universe." That's the saying, right?

Anyway, last week my dad fell off a ladder and broke both his wrists. Dislocated and shattered them both, actually. Also, broke his neck. Also, found out he has a brain tumor that could potentially blind him. And spent 5 days in a hospital, an hour away from where we live. So, yeah. Not the easiest week.

So I didn't post.

I did write, though. Improbably, and impractically, I worked on my novel, and my side project, and my journaling. I stayed up until 2:30 one morning in the hotel bathroom, typing away on my Chromebook. It was the first real work I'd gotten done in months. And it was the worst possible time. 

That's the thing about life: it will never stop sucking. Ok, fine, maybe life isn't always terrible, but it is always changing. 

My mom always tells me that life is like a road. "You're going along, and you think you can see where the road is going. You think it's going to keep on in the direction it has been, but you never know when there's going to be a sharp turn, or a dip in the road. You never really know what's coming," she says. And despite the similarity of this philosophy to a certain animated character's song ("Just around the riverbend!"), she's right. We have this idea that life will keep plodding along in its reliable monotony forever, while in reality we are hurtling at break-neck speed through an ever-expanding and unpredictable universe, and every second that we don't fly off course and go careening into the sun, is a second that we're lucky. 

And every second that we don't careen into the sun, is a second that we could be writing.

Look, life is never going to make it easy for you. Life is never going to hand you the time, resources, and endless supply if inspiration/confidence it takes to achieve what you want. You have to take it. You have to snatch it, wrestle it from the icy grasp of an infinite and indifferent universe, and clamp it between your knees and ride it on the winds of chaos as far as you can until it bucks you off.

It's almost impossible to get anything done in this insane world, where things just happen, and any illusion we have of control over our lives slowly trickles away, until we die. It's not fair. We are impermanent, and we are small.

Art is hard.

Life is hard.

Write anyway.