How to Look at the World as a Writer
As the school bus pulls out of the parking lot, I realize I have three options: panic, completely leave my body and shut off my mind, or, start looking at the journey like a writer.
I am chaperoning the third grade class trip to the zoo. The emergency exit beside my seat rattles with such force I swear I can feel my jaw grating against the bones in my ears.
One poor kid gets bus sick. Oh, darling, I can relate. Fortunately, everyone else on the bus seems to have stomachs and nervous systems made of stainless steel. Fellow students are kind (or just oblivious) and the teacher seems to take it all in stride. She ends up having a great day.
We cross the Hudson River, all wide and gorgeous, but it's cloaked in spring haze due to the wildfires already burning across distant corners of the continent.
“The arterial” takes us through downtown Poughkeepsie with its boarded up storefronts and scattering of hopeful new businesses. Just beyond the city limits, new crops of condominiums spring up where the farms used to be. Then, we enter the unrelenting fabulous green of an idyllic upstate town, pocked with massive houses and blanketed in equestrian estates.
Finally, we reach our destination: a zoo at a private boarding school.
How to look at the world like a writer.
How to be in the world like a writer.
As I said, the noise and vibration of the bus were so intense, I was ready to jump out of my skin. It would have been easy to pull out the phone (and risk bus sickness), and dissociate for an hour, but I’m grateful I found a way to root into my body and open my mind to see the trip as a writer rather than an overwhelmed passenger dreaming of her writing desk.
If you care to see, every aspect of the trip is a potential portal to new understanding and to a story waiting to unfold.
Here are just a few of the stories I could explore…
This wasn't a trip to global conflict zone, but, nonetheless, it was a tax on my nervous system. Not so long ago, this situation wouldn't have fazed me in the least, but choice and circumstance have transformed my constitution. How and why have I changed? Is this something to be "fixed" or embraced?
The river wants to be seen for all that it was and all that it could be. What stories did the people who lived on its banks tell before it was named for the man who led the first conquest? What sort of creatures called this water home before the factories upstream belched out their poisons?
The contrast between the struggling city and the wealthy little hamlet. Income inequality, systemic racism, the endless sprawl of new development when downtown stands vacant, and the price that the earth and the more-than-human world pays for the flaws of contemporary human society... It all feels too big to name, but I need to do something. What part of this wider societal story of inequity and destruction is mine to address?
The tiny zoo is both a refuge and a prison. How do we hold wonder and grief in the presence of endangered animals who have no chance in the wild?
And, of course, being bus sick. Empathy for a kiddo dealing with a body that refuses to "behave" kindles a dozen tales (and triggers a whole lot of unresolved childhood trauma, too).
As a person who is preoccupied with stories of the past, the health of the natural world, and hopes of creating a healthier, more sustainable future for all people, any of these questions could take me down an interesting, useful path.
And, simply by paying attention to such a concoction of stress and inspiration, I am a stronger writer.
What about you? Have you been on an “adventure” that stretched you beyond your comfort zone lately?
Rather than soothe yourself with your phone, could you look to your next out-of-the-ordinary experience as an invitation to see the world through the eyes of a writer?
I have been returning to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way lately. I am lingering on a quote she includes from Sophocles that’s so profound and so deceptively simple: ”Look and you will find it–what is unsought will go undetected.”
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