“Write as if you were dying.”

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?

–Annie Dillard, from “Write Till You Drop,” The New York Times, 1989

Finding forgotten change

The night before yesterday found myself searching for an old phone’s charger in the vortex that is my ‘electronics’ storage. Earlier during the day, little Mr Toddler had decided to give his grand mom’s phone a dip in the bathwater. That led us to search for a backup phone and its charger. Couldn’t find the charger but came across a gift card that I had totally forgotten about. The search for the charger was promptly abandoned with the next hour or two spent on Amazon.

Initially, I thought of ordering a few books for the perpetrator of the phone in bath crime. Books that his mom had recently saved on our wish list. Unfortunately, due to some hiccup, I could not purchase any of those. Nor any other ‘physical’ book or product. So, I moved on to my e-books wish list to see if the card still worked or not. And now I’ve seven new books in my Kindle library.

Life’s little joys.

Kind of finding some forgotten change in the front pocket of a denim you are wearing after a long time and buying ice cream with it.

Only when you hear in your eyes you will know

For a person in love with words since a very young age, for someone who makes a living by writing, it seems surreal to accept that words need not convey the exact or complete meaning of what one wants to say. But then, who better to know the fallibility of words than a writer himself. Even if he is a writer in the global advertising industry :)

Apart from a few sporadic poems hidden in my phone’s notes, I have not written much for the past few years. That poet-blogger, non-advertising side of my writing life got buried under deadlines, fatigue, stress, responsibilities, and God knows what all. That said, today I’m not in a mood to dwell in the past. This blog is an attempt to correct that wrong.

May I succeed in this endeavour.

And may you hear what I want to say.

The title of this post is from a book I’ve just started reading. ‘The Language of Zen’ by Richard Burnett Carter.