The Tyranny of What Exists

Guest Post by Kim W.

In June, I went to France and I didn't eat very much cheese. This is ridiculous because within the geographical borders of France you will find a high concentration of the things I hold most dear:

- Wine. The national motto is Liberté, Egalité, Drunkité
- Language. A beautiful language that I hack to bits with my wicked Franglais. (NB: "Drunkité" is not a word.)
- Food. Cheese, chocolate, pastries, bread, truffles, more cheese.

I went to France with the express goal of eating my face off, but I didn't. It was really hard to undo years of turning down dessert and making 'sensible eating choices'. I couldn't shake the rules I'd created for myself. 

Too many pit stops at the office candy bowl? No problem. Candy bowl entirely off limits. 
Caloric intake too high? Only coffee at coffee shops, nothing else. Stop drinking calories (alcohol excluded, of course). Don't go shopping without a list of things you actually need. Don't even step foot into a store you can't afford. Don't sing and/or dance unless everyone else is also singing and/or dancing. 

It's easier to walk the straight and narrow with a few little boundaries. Don't do this, don't do that. Just some bumpers to keep me from throwing a gutter ball every time. 

But the innocent guidelines start to add up to something not so helpful. In his description of Netflix culture, CEO Reed Hastings says that any successful company must avoid "barnacles" that can slow down a fast-moving business. It should also make tough decisions without agonizing, and focus on great results rather than the process. 

I've been collecting barnacles, collecting process. Agonizing over whether or not to eat the cheese. 

I've even collected barnacles when it comes to writing. I already wrote this post once, actually. It fell into the exact same format as all my posts for TGL. Notice the seemingly unrelated anecdote at the top, followed quickly by a bulleted list? (Throw in a teensy joke in a parenthesis.) And let's not forget the overall cautious tone, because God knows who's reading this, and I don't want to offend anyone, and things on the internets last forever. It's hard to escape your habits.

In "Several Short Sentences About Writing", Verlyn Klinkenborg doles out a hit parade of advice that ostensibly relates to prose, but easily doubles as advice on living life:

Writers at every level of skill experience the tyranny of what exists.
It can be overwhelming - the inertia of the paragraphs and pages you've already composed, the sentences you've already written,
No matter how rough they are. 

Whether you love what you've written or not,
Those sentences have the virtue of already existing,
Which makes them better than sentences that don't exist.
Or so it seems.

I scrapped the post and started over. Well, scrapped the last half, at least. I really do love bulleted lists. 

Then, I went to a concert. Even though I don't normally go to concerts because they're loud, scary places where the appropriate level of singing and/or dancing isn't immediately clear. But it was one of my favorite bands, complete with a tiny, adorable, French female vocalist. Towards the end of the show she did something pretty standard for a concert - asking for audience participation. She asked everyone to close their eyes and feel the beat. I expected her to end with an imperative like, "Dance!" or "Jump!", but instead, she encouraged everyone to, "Close your eyes... feel the beat... now do whatever you want!" 

So I did. I danced like an idiot, came home, ate some dessert, and wrote about shedding barnacles.