Discipline and Grace –

I am a writer. I write every day. But, it isn’t sheer willpower or genius that gets me to the computer and sets my fingers tapping. It takes a lot more than that to get a writer to write. It takes discipline and grace.

Yes, there’s a dash of genius in everything I write. There’s always a point in my writing where I lose myself and fall into the void that is the universal mind – or should I say, it happens almost every time. There are those occasions when I sit down to write and nothing flows. It feels like trying to connect to the internet when there’s no wifi signal. I just sit there and wait. On those days, I have to forgive myself, close the laptop and go on with my day. Every artist has creative droughts.

But, on the good days when everything is flowing, it’s grace that is at work. The bridge to the place where all words originate is grace. It has little to do with genius and nothing to do with me. It’s a miracle that I will never fully understand and most likely never be able to communicate. But, every day I sit down to write and wait for grace to strike, which she does quite regularly.

That brings me to discipline. Grace is the ultimate wallflower. She sits quietly on the sidelines and waits for an invitation to dance. If I never open the computer and start to tap, I miss the chance to dance with grace. It takes discipline to “find” the time to write. When I make it a priority through active intention, the discipline turns into paragraphs that sometimes  unleash magic – other times it’s just a bunch of crap. It takes a lot of grace combined with discipline to find your genius. In the meantime, just sit down and write!