Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.*
Chuck Close

Best not to wait for the
muse or
guide or
godot
to get here.

There’s plenty we can be getting on with,
As Verlyn Klinkenborg writes helpfully for all of us:

And like “flow,” “natural” is one of the words behind
writer’s block.
So let’s suppose there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
There’s loss of confidence
And forgetting to think
And failing to prepare
And not reading enough
And giving up on patience
And hastening to write
And fearing our audience
And never really trying to understand how the sentences
work.
Above all, there’s never learning to trust yourself
Or your capacity to learn or think or perceive.**

He’s not only penning these words for writers
but for all of us.

Beginning with loss of confidence,
Simone Weil writes:

If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess
exactly what we desire.^

So let’s go there first,
And then we may know what to think,
How to prepare,
What to read,
How to be patient,
Where to begin
and where not to,
Understanding our “audience,”
And most of all,
Understanding ourselves.

When we arrive on earth, we are provided with no map for our life journey. Only gradually, as our identity forms and we get an inking of who we are, do possibilities begin to emerge that call us.^^

*Quoted in Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals;
**Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
^Quoted in John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^^John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us.