Writing ...

(Music: Debussy's Clair de Lune, if you don't have your own handy at the moment...)



Writing days ...


I am adopting writing as a hobby. I don't know if I have ever written anything that is worth showing to someone...Perhaps you don't know until you try. Anyway writing, much like reading, has been a helping hand at hard times and has recently become a need to me. It is a shelter and a reliable source for motivation when I can't find other sources around.

(I am an absolute beginner, but) it doesn't take a long time to realize how exciting it can be waiting for inspiration and, on the other hand, how empty you can feel when it doesn't come.

Inspiration seems to be something interesting. Sometimes it is related to calm, sometimes to stress.
Sometimes it comes on gloomy days, some times it's impossible to write a word if you don't whip all your gloom away first.


























You may wait for a long time without coming across a single idea...or you may find yourself exposed to a rain of interesting topics, scenes, etc. that hit you while queing in the supermarket, driving or playing tennis, for instance.

There is, however, a situation where I can almost be sure that inspiration will come: traveling.
There are many kinds of travels; physical journeys are only one of them. But this one greatly helps inspiration coming.
Finding myself on a plane, on a train, on a bus...with several hours ahead available to fill with something...Watching the landscapes, the cloudscapes with their mysterious drawings...feeling how the world moves away from you, just to find, eventually, that it remains in the same place where you left it...

That's why I don't like going anywhere without a pencil and a piece of paper...



























Last time, I took two of my favourite books with me. Both are about traveling, describe long and exciting trips. One of them involving physical travels too. This time I opened the other one around the middle pages. The main character was visiting places I had been to just days before. It was like reading my travel diary. The places were not physical; they were cognitive places, emotional landscapes. I could have written something very similar (if I had had the skills necessary). And I bet this story's author has never visited the physical places I have; I will probably never walk along the streets, the parks, the concert halls where (s)he came across these ideas...Or maybe I will, if I take a cultural trip or something ...But, even in those places, I won't necessarily get an inspiration so amazingly similar that I have had this time. Indeed, I could have arrived to the same place as any other author or any other person wherever, even if we have grown up in totally different cultures.

Muses seem to travel chaotically across space-time and their favourite play seems to be establishing connections between places and spaces light-years away. Such connections help us finding the things that are, in the end, common to all of us...