I don't care if I'm in a time loop, I still have to do my morning pages
Twenty minutes, every day, no matter what.
“As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.” Except for me, because nothing ever changes, because today is Tuesday, March 8th, again for the thousandth time. Ten-thousandth time? Honestly, I don’t know for sure. I’ve lost count.
And still, I wake to the sound of my alarm at 5:30 AM, even if I turned it off the night before, or let my phone battery die, or threw my phone off a cliff into the abyss. There it is on my nightstand, playing my tongue-in-cheek selection of The Arcade Fire’s Wake Up to wake me up, and I obey - because it’s hard for me to fall back asleep once I’m up. So I might as well open this once again fresh notebook, and dump out my brain for three pages of stream-of-consciousness zen onto the crisp, white, blank sheets of perfect paper that represent the pure and infinite possibilities that allude me once again.
It’s not a bad way to start my day. It puts me in the right headspace and clears out any weird thoughts or insecurities, even though I should be free of them because I know every single thing that’s going to happen today down to the very second. There are no surprises left. Except for what I write down here in this notebook. And even that, I’m not entirely sure, is completely new. I can’t be certain how many times I’ve accidentally written down the exact same thoughts during my brain dump. I never get the chance to go back and read them, and even if I could, you’re not supposed to do that all the time. It’s not the point of The Artist’s Way. It’d probably be a bummer to find out I wrote this exact same thing in my pages eight thousand or so odd days ago. Have I not evolved in that time? I could write these pages in French now, but does it count as change if I write the exact same words in a different vocabulary?
If I’m going to be honest, I’m starting to doubt The Way (that’s what I call it now). In one part, it tells us “when we move out of faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance.” Well, I’ve been doing these pages every day, I’ve been creating just for the sake of creation, and not a damn thing has advanced, universally speaking. I’m finding joy in the process itself, which I have to, because at the end of the day, anything I’ve done is lost forever to whatever cruel universe has been robbing me of tomorrow.
On the other hand, that actually brings me back to The Way, because in some ways (lowercase w), I am the truest artist there is. I know that sounds high-falutin, but nobody will ever read this (not even me). While others aren’t certain what tomorrow will bring, I can’t be certain there will be a tomorrow at all. Revisions can only take place from what’s left in my mind. My work can only evolve as far as my memory will allow. But still, I’d feel pretty bad if I came out of this without a fully fleshed-out screenplay up in there. I’m still kicking myself for not taking advantage of the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Maybe I’m hanging on to The Pages as a crutch. Because it’s all I know. Maybe I’m like that guy I know, who, sometime in his teens, realized that he never drank coffee before and decided that he would never drink coffee just so he could say he never drank coffee ever once in his whole life. What’s the point of that? At best, he tells somebody that fact, and they say, “Oh,” or possibly, “Neat,” or maybe even, “Why?” And then he has to tell the whole story, which is that he realized it as a teen and then just made a decision, and then we’re just kind of back to “Oh.” At worst, he breaks the streak, and it causes him to spiral and question everything about who he is at his core. Or maybe he doesn’t take it that seriously. But he has to. Or he would just have a fucking cup of coffee. Maybe I’m like that, but with writing The Pages. Maybe I’m just doing it because I decided that I would do it. Maybe that’s why anybody does anything.
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