Alive: Hemingway Style (Tending to the Writer in Me, Day 3 of 31)

This business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself,
"How ALIVE am I willing to be?" ~Anne Lamott

For three weeks, I've been walking through my days as a 40 year old.  In my mind, my mom was always forty, even when she wasn't.  It was the official age of adulthood.  So here I am, more officially an adult,  with four of my unknown allotment of decades already lived.  It's a milestone kind of year, bringing  reflection on steps taken and expectation for the messy beautiful steps to come.  

I'm grateful in advance for those steps yet taken, stories yet written. Grateful that I've got a chance to see each 24 hours as a hope filled portion given me.  Each sunrise a new chance to move toward those things that bring LIFE to my family and me. 

Writing has always been one of my life grantors.  A journal and sharpened pencil invite creativity, hope, clarification, the giving of an offering, connection, gratitude, opportunity.  It's offering up a generous portion of myself, and mining for connections with readers.  It's being stretched, solidifying opinions, exploring questions and sharing faith.   Pen to paper, I feel spilled out and used up, all the best fully awake sensations. 

Written words allow me to pounce in rain puddles with my preschooler in his rubber boots, and then live it again, tapping keys on my keyboard, really noticing the beauty in the memory.  It's taking a deeper look at life, and seeing the days as stories. 

I really like that ALIVE feeling, and am finally learning to go for more of it.  The completely and fully all the way kind of going for it.  At my truest self, I am a storyteller, and  I've got a thousand little stories to tell.  It's about time to start tending to the writer in me, the fully awake, forty year old one.   

Ernest Hemingway offered a "how to" for this alive kind of living: 

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

Yes, Ernest, yes. 


*This is post number 3 in my 31 day series: Tending to the Writer in Me". 

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