Writing Blogger

It’s Friday, and for me this day of the week always seems like it’s time for reflection. Lately I’ve been reading Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life?, a collection of essays/interviews/stories with about 70 people on how each struggled to find — or failed to find, or still was struggling to find – the path they felt was meant for them in life. Some followed traditional career paths and found them deadening, others followed far less conventional paths and found them lacking as well.

The common thread that I find running through the book is that, contrary to what I imagined as a child and a teenager, maybe we can’t find that one single thing that we can love to do every single day, that will make us happy for the rest of our lives if we keep doing that one single thing (which, for me, was playing center field in the major leagues, of course).

What keeps us interested and alive, on the other hand, is following our intuitions and enthusiasms — seeking out the new, the interesting, the out-of-left-field and constantly expanding our range of possibilities. Which also got me thinking to how that applies to the work I do — it’s difficult for me as a writer to do the same kind of work over and over and over, ad infinitum. Variety is essential. And if I’m not able to take on new and different kinds of work, I find myself growing stale, and not producing work of the same caliber.

This isn’t so much a week-to-week shift or a month-to-month shift, as it is something that happens every few years. There’s that need to reach out and find new ground that always asserts itself, sooner or later. And, I find that when I return to types of work I’m already familiar with, I bring a new freshness and energy to them if I’ve taken the time to follow my enthusiasms and bring something new to my work/writing life.

I had given thought to actually leaving the world of freelancing and returning to the seeming safety and security of a corporate job. But now I’m feeling (thanks to Bronson’s book) a new energy and enthusiasm for what I’ve already been doing, an energy that I don’t know I would have found without seriously considering throwing it all away. Maybe that’s what it takes: a willingness to say goodbye to something before you can really embrace it.

Ahh, well… I’m waxing philosophic now! Interested to hear your $0.02.