Mental Calisthenics
Waking up late in the morning to the shouts inside the house between my parents who both manned the store at the front of the house, asking each other what was the price of a certain items were, I opened my eyes resolute that the day ahead is the day in which I have to start working on my writing. There was nothing left for me to do, and it seemed the task had been waiting for me ever since I began my self-imposed exile from real work.
I have to write, I said to myself. I have to do some mental calisthenics, flex my writing muscles. And what I had in mind then was the 15-page requirement a student of Creative Writing has to finish before the end of the semester. Indeed I will never be a writer, with a book to boost, if I cannot even pull that simple feat.
I have to write. Write again like I used to do without bothering anything about the world outside since my last refuge and salvation is with writing. Yeah, I will write. I will write those things that I saw and heard and felt and those things that I learned.
There is no other way.
Looking Back
When I started out this personal blog a couple of years ago, my agenda, like the usual blogger out there, was to utilize this free space in the vast universe of the Internet as a venue where I could post my peripatetic musings about life. Of course I cannot deny that I intended also to use this blog to hone my writing skill with the aim of perfecting the art of essay writing.
With excited, controlled pounding of my heart, I tried to set a goal of writing at least an essay in a week, pretending that I have a column here in the net which I need to maintain. (To think, I just have to mimic what I normally do for almost a decade in which I maintain a personal journal in my computer which unluckily had been deleted by an unscrupulous hacker.) The only question that hung in the air was whether I could stick and beat my imagined deadline.
And the answer to that, after all this time, is that I fall short. My postings are like erratic downpour in a summer season. Though I can blame that to the demise of my computer – which is now like a chop-chop vehicle with its memory chips, video card and harddisk dismantled from the CPU. With nothing to write with, my mindset of delivering to my own expectation has gone wayward.
Nevertheless, the aim of using this free space as a venue for honing my writing skill does not change. Right now, I’ve begun, like an old boxer, training for the task ahead. Anyway, as long as blogging is free and my postings are safe in the virtual world of the net, then I will write and post them here.
About an-essay-in-a-week thing, I’m still trying to gather my momentum then I’ll go ahead performing the task.
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