Pre-Birthday Confessions: What Literature Has Taught Me

Occasionally, I will look up—from the book covers I'm buried in, or computer screen I'm plastered to—and experience a mild panic. What have I done with my life, I'll wonder, and has the extraordinary gamble of devoting myself to literature (at the expense of all else) been worth it; has it paid off? Sure, it's nice to have seven books of prose and poetry to my name, but at what cost?

Four days shy of turning 45 years old (which, in turn, is 5 years short of 50!) I'm asking myself these questions with renewed urgency. But, once the anxious flutter subsides, I'm left with the same answer.

I had no choice, really, there could have been no other way. A life of letters—first as voracious reader, then as delirious writer—has meant so many things for me, it is difficult to untangle them.

On one level, reading and writing is play, serious play, and escapism, from suffering I was not otherwise equipped to deal with. Which is to say, it is a deeply enjoyable form of self-medication, altered consciousness, self-parenting, even.

Books—by others and, eventually, my own—were there for me in ways that people were not/could not. They revealed me to myself, over time, mentored me, sustained and inspired me—giving me a way to be in this world, but not of it...

Strange to say, perhaps, but it was reading and writing that also taught me how to meditate—slipping through the bars of self and time— as well as how to bow, give thanks, pray. Whether or not I realized it, from the start, books pointed me in the direction of the long, hard road to transformation, and helped me take the first steps.

Admittedly, at times, life as a writer has seemed like a lonely vocation. Yet, in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Literature, my own and others, has in fact, repeatedly, rescued me from loneliness and connected me to the world.

Miraculously, it has gifted me friends across space and time, raising the dead from previous generations, as well as granting far flung readers of my own work that I've connected with, virtually.

In the poignant words of Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges: Despite a writer's life being solitary, if they are lucky, they might come to discover they are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends.

Thank you, invisible friends, for being part of my recent reincarnation as a blogger, and sharing my literary life with me. I hope I’ve not been too self- indulgent and that, at its finest, my writing has aspired to bearing witness and a life of service.

I hope, too, that my words have mysteriously given voice to your silences, dear readers, the way my literary masters articulated what was still silent in my heart.

In closing, kindly find below a short poem of mine that touches on some of the Existential themes I’ve raised, here.