One is gone forever, another embedded in eternity

BIMBO CABIDOG

  Writing has its share of doubts and hesitation vacillation can stop it on its tracks. But like a bug, it keeps disturbing, gnawing to hold the pen. It itches to etch on the blank page. It urges to start drawing lines, and forming them into words. Soon, the blank page is filled. Writers cannot help but write all the time. It is a mode of existence hard to buck.

To write is to try to reflect what’s out there, what are going on, rhyme and reason, often unable to give birth to anything. The business-oriented pragmatists say, engage in it then you kill time. They don’t have that luxury. It makes you feel guilty to write, because you tend to agree that time is too expensive a commodity to spend just languishing on the unsaid word.

Peter Drucker teaches that time is the limiting factor. So, should you indulge on the pen? Trying to scribble a sentence, but not succeeding, how much hours in my youth I saw seemingly going to nothing. I was so bad at it that getting to say something coherently via the written word took great pains. Hopeless, helpless and going nowhere, as the clock ticked and sweat moistened my hands and forehead, I would just doze. And thought froze.

But still young to be under my parents’ care, worry or tension was out. I lived for the present. I did not have to finish something or work at something on time. My stint with the here and now was timeless. I did not pay attention to the idea, but presumably wasting time on fruitless writing was priceless, simply because it was not concerned with any monetary equivalent. To do so just for the love of doing so was happy hour.

The labor or play somehow paid off. Now, I can finish composing a sentence, or most effectively say something even without composing a sentence. I can string thoughts into an article and be confident enough to see it on newsprint. There is that high sense of achievement reading my piece on a newspaper’s page. It has also given me confidence to write.

Passion fuels the craft with a continuous surge of energy. For writing is not just about expression, but feeling. The writer does not just tell what’s happening. He/she plumb the depth of the human experience. What is being written engages him/her as if he/she is part of it, living the drama, lending an invaluable perspective.

Telling as the writer does plugs into a connection. In the same manner that an electrical outlet does, it immediately conducts volts of trembling current to the soul. It strikes a sensitive spot there, like plucking the chords of a guitar and producing melody. Many of those harmonious chords in varying voices, tones and sounds produce the music of a symphony orchestra – the piece the writer finally achieves on his/her readers. Writing, thus, does not only need skill, but skill smelted into golden  prose or poetry by talent.

But if as an art a piece of writing is timeless, it still cannot afford to lose relevance. It must take up stuff that the people go through in their daily lives in real time. A good read does not confine itself to swooning about the birds and the bees, or how lovable a piece of eternity is, like a cascading waterfall down a moss-covered limestone cliff in a deep forest. It disturbs the stagnancy of matter and the inertia of force by putting each back into the current of time.

I have attempted at great work self-consciously striving to infuse drama and oratory to what is thought as an otherwise boring narrative. I did not begin with a humble opening. I assaulted the blank paper at once with clichés and stereotypes that have had their day, but already wore out a past glory. This set me into heaping the stint with self-praise and vainglory. It becomes an exercise in storytelling made discordant by high-falutin and presumptuous language.

Did I say things hard to get a handle on? Or did I make them clear enough, like a cool spring under a sweltering day? In the end, what matters is not that I simply love writing, but that people love what I write. What matters is that I connected the words, like electric pulses, into the hearts of those who care to read it, and that the message nested in their head to give birth to countless offspring. For every event that breaks, every reality that shows, one aspect leaves to be gone forever. But still, another remains, stuck in the bulletin board of eternity.