The Habit Called I Don’t Have Anything to Say

Sitting down with an intention to write triggers a response that feels like the theater house lights just came down. Suddenly a black rectangle shows up in front of my mind’s eye and I have been struck dumb, sans idea, sans thought.  If this is a matter of habitual response to a trigger, what do I do to establish a new habit? Can it be a simple has replacing that image of a black triangle with a white one, or a yellow one, or a scintillating neon one?

Does communicating mean having something to say?

It is absolutely necessary to write something if your are maintaining a blog. Or is it? Call for re-examination. What about a posting an image, a gallery of photos following the growth and maturation of the tomato plant outside my window? What about posting an audio clip of children laughing, a video of kites stretching against the boundaries of their strings? What about posting a series of quotes on a favorite topic? Or quotes from a favorite book.

Having something important to say

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say; it’s that I don’t have anything important to say;I don’t have anything meaningful to say;  don’t have anything useful to say. Aha! Its that I don’t anything to say of the slightest interest to anybody else.

That matters when writing something to sell to others for entertainment, for edification, for education, or for information. If you are not writing for an audience of buyers, that burden lifts leaving you  free to journey into the realms of utter nonsense, incomprehensibility, and the joy of being boring. In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde “I love talking about nothing. It is the only thing I know anything about.

After all, there will always be an audience of one: either your inner self writing to your experience of the outer world, or your experience of the outer world writing to your inner self.

And that leads me to two possible topics for other blog posts: the fun of being boring, and how much do we shape the experience of our senses by writing about them