Is there anyone in there?

I was asked today what I did when I experienced true beauty and wonder, in whatever awe-inspiring guise it might take. Did I phone a friend and tell them all about it? Did I stop and stare as if I could fix it in my memory? Or did I look around for the means to write it down?
I was asked this as I read through one of the writing handbooks I have taken out the library to start me on my freelance writing quest. I pondered for a moment: I'm not much of a ponderer, if I haven't an answer straight away I tend to think I'm not good enough to find one. But as I watched a program about the way human beings deal with nature's toughest challenges I found my answer quickly enough.
I suddenly found that I did want to write about what I was seeing. For two reasons: I wanted to share the awe I felt when I watched a person crossing what amounted to a tightrope across a torrential, gushing river to feed his family for the day. I also wanted to write a quite different and less beautiful story asking why people in the west were so selfish - I spend all of my time worrying about the money I owe, the things I can't buy, and all the time this guy is taking his life into his own hands to feed his family every day. I wanted to write about the greed of a culture that has made me so worried about 'surviving' that I have borrowed money until I can't afford to pay it back, just so that they can make me feel inadequate again when they intimidate me with their threats of bankruptcy and losing everything I have. What will they take from me anyway? No matter what they do I will have my life. The man over the river doesn't care for finances and empty threats made by money grabbing fat cats; he moves slowly, hand over hand, foot over foot, his only concern is staying alive. I find it ironic that his only worry is the one thing that I can guarantee above anything else: none of my worries will have the power to take my life. Yet I would rather live in fear like him than sit in my comfartable house and worry that one day I might have to move into a smaller place and stop renting DVDs. It's ridiculous when you look at it like that and I feel a huge sense of shame that I live this priviledged life. I was born into it, that is not my fault, but to not even have thought of the futility of it all before now humbles me. I could change my life, but that isn't the point. The point is the system that has sucked me in. The point is the senseless greed, the way we create ownership and place our own values on things that ultimately aren't even real. Debt, money, possessions, they don't really have value. They come and go and we are forced to feel that if they are taken away from us we will somehow cease to be living. But we won't. What can they do if one day we just turn around and tell them we won't accept their values any more, that suddenly the rules have stopped applying? Would the world spontaneously combust? Would we all stop being? No. Life would just become simple. Perhaps it would just be about living.

I didn't realise that when I started to explain what I wanted to write about it was all going to come out like that. I simply wanted to outline the point that I had found the desire to write and to share, that it had always been there. I guess I proved that.
There is certainly a voice in there, but that rant would take a lot of shaping if it were to end up as a story, I know that. I think it is enough to know that the story is there, if I need it.

Getting serious

I have had some very interesting ocnversations over the past week; it's interesting that when you begin to open yourself to possibilities more seem to show up than you initially thought were available to you. Some of these we bring about ourselves by being proactive, some just seem to fall into your lap because you happened to think of a course of action. Whatever the reason - call it fate if you like - I'm determined to continue a trail of thought that I hope will ensure more and more opportunities drop into my lap in a similar manner.
If I really want to become a writer, I have spent an awful lot of time sitting around thinking about it. Whether it has been fear of failure, fear of success or general feelings of inadaquacy that have caused my procrastination seems nothing more than academic now; I have to start creating openings for myself and stop living in my own utopia where not a jot of hard work will ever be necessary. My thought seems to have been: if I don't work for it, I can always dream that it might happen while never actually confirming or denying my ability.
Time to take a stand and get myself out there. I can't say that I'm not terrified of the results, but I have more of a sense of achievement after a couple of hours than I have ever had in the rest of my life. I have had an idea, now let's see if I can sell it...

One year on...

Why is it that the longer you leave something, no matter how much you know you are going to enjoy it, the harder it becomes to tie yourself down to it? It's been a year since I wrote a blog and I'm nervous about coming back to it!
I still have the same dreams, I still want the same things, yet here I am, still dreaming, still wanting. I haven't met the dragon head on, I didn't even get that far the first time around, but a lot has happened and perhaps I won't have to wait for third time lucky.
Sometimes when you really want something it is that very thing that you avoid, put off, procrastinate about, in order that perhaps you might never have to face up to the fact that you want it so much you don't know what you would do if you got it; if you failed...well you fail every day that you don't do anything about it. That's far easier to deal with.
Perseverance is a state of mind; the most vital state of mind for getting anything that you really want. Admitting that you really want something is, I suppose, the first step. I WANT TO BE A WRITER. There. I've admitted it. I don't suddenly expect the job offers to come pouring in, but at least I can feel a sense of peace about my goal and ambition.
Positivity is another state of mind. I'm still working on that one, but I think I'm mpving in the right direction; that's my first positive step.
This is the story of my journey through becoming a writer, interesting to very few I expect, but writing, writing anything, is paramount at this stage. I don't think that because I haven't written for a year I have become a failure; I have taken a vital chapter of my journey and it hasn't involved writing. I suppose that even the non-writing has been a part of my experience as a writer. What have I learnt from it about writing? Not much. What have I learnt from it about my fears and the dreams I have? Plenty. The fact that I am still here and have taken this up again because it was once more thrown my way has shown me that real dreams don't ever go away and if this one is here to stay, then I'd beeter get on and satisfy it. It's the only way I will ever become whole, become my real self. It feels a bit like that with writing to me. It's as if I have something missing if words don't feature in my life in a major way - books, diaries, stories, poems, essays, I could consume them everlastingly without ever feeling full.
So I start another chapter of my writing journey and I'm sure that this one will have more writing in it than the previous chapter, perhaps even more than the one before that. I have my fingers crossed and my eyes towards the sky...