Ink Tea Stone Leaf

What do you write when your head is foggy, and your hands are tired?

You can write about what is bothering you—how foggy your head is, how tired your hands are. You can write about the poor state of the world, if your head is just clear enough to give you an idea of what that is, exactly. You can write about all of your frustrations, all the little ways that your life fails to add up to your wildest dreams, like the fact that you aren’t ten years younger than you are anymore, or that you haven’t been adequately rewarded for your best intentions.

You can write about good things instead—how nice it feels to come home at last, how sweetly your loyal pet greets you when you open the door, how good the record sounds when you put it on the player, how lovely the singer sounds when she hits that note. You can write about your beautiful wife and your mug of tea and how you really don’t need that much in your life to be happy, you know that’s true, even when your head is foggy.

Maybe you’ll try to indulge yourself a little, and write about how you’d like things to be. You can paint a picture of yourself relaxed, warm and well-fed, sexually satisfied and rested from the perfect night’s sleep, perhaps enjoying an old fashioned cocktail once or twice a week. After you stop writing, you can get up and try to move your life along in the direction of what you wrote, if you don’t have too much else on your docket.

You could always reminisce about the good times, like that weekend you spent making love in somebody else’s house, or that time you stayed awake all night with your friends and still managed to wake up hungover. Nobody else will know what you’re talking about, unless they’re the ones you were staying up with or making love to, and that’s fine. You don’t always write for people who know what you are talking about.

If you’re really stuck, you can write about your mundane, quotidian observations—see how dark it gets so early this time of year? It didn’t use to do that when you lived further south. That’s just geometry, and there’s nothing anybody can do about the curvature of the Earth, except move south of course.

You can plead for world peace, and feel like you’ve done your part for pleading. There are very few people in this world who have the power to take decisive action in response to your pleas, and most of them are too busy ordering somebody’s death to read a post on a blog that nobody reads. But pleading is cathartic, so when your hands are tired you may as well tend to your own emotional needs.

Whatever you write, you get it down on your paper or your word processing software, and then you let it be until the next time. Maybe you include an apology to yourself, or your editor, or any interested party you haven’t thought to apologize to, for not having the discipline to work on something more serious during all your waking hours. Everybody works harder than you, it seems, but you can cut yourself a little break, because you wrote something, even if it was only an apology.