Letting stuff happen

There are times when I just want to write - feel my fingers on the keyboard, find out what it is that I want to say. Sometimes I can bring myself to do it, sometimes not.

It's especially hard not to look back on the words that have just appeared, out of somewhere, and put them into a shape that will somehow make sense, form a pattern and become real.

The real trick, I think, is just letting go and letting them be what they will without trying too hard.

Easy to say but very hard to do.

For people who don't know what they think until they see what they say, letting go is a torment. It send shivers up their backs, makes their toes curl.

Editing is easy, if time-consuming. It's a thing that makes you pore over every word until you're sure that that's the one you really wanted to use, the only one that will do. It seems designed to make you turn in on yourself, make you think 'Is that really what I meant?' It seems designed to cripple you. It's the thing that means you can't just play. Let yourself go. The thing that makes you believe that the only thing that matters is the perfectly turned sentence, the jewel-like thought.

I am resisting very hard the temptation to go back to the top of this posting, to see what I thought I meant when I started it. To see if there was a point to it, other than just playing. The thing that matters at the moment is my fingers on the keyboard, Keith Jarrett in the background, in an otherwise silent house because the people I share it with have all gone to bed.