If we enjoy what we do, we are more likely to do it, for it is what we enjoy.
That’s the small insight that appeared in my mind today; that it is through enjoyment that a person practices for long hours, refines their craft, creates entire tapestries from mere words stitched together beyond exam sheets and scripts – it is how a person can write a book without using AI when the payoff is uncertain and the hours are long.
It is true that writing a book or practicing for an exam shouldn’t purely be a matter of passion and should be a matter of systems, processes, and discipline; without systems, you limit your attainment to the height of your passion, after all.
Yet, it is true that without enjoyment, you limit your motivation to the dictates of planning – useful and needed – but discount the greater possibilities ahead that come from a genuine passion.
To find that passion is almost a matter of chance – and I was deliberate with that wording. Passion must be ‘found’ – actively located, whether searched for or come across; yet it is ‘almost’ a matter of chance and not certainly, for while it is possible that the literary child can form in a home with books, so too can she come into being in one without them through the sheer force of will and conscious effort to see…
These words matter.
The words I choose matter.
If I stitch the quilt a different way, people will understand it differently – by the staccato drumbeat of my fingers on this page and by the smell and markings of black ink on my fingers, they will see new possibilities – possibilities that I will unearth by the written page word by word, minute by minute, asking myself:
Why is this good?
Why is that better?
Why was that bad?
Why was what he did, she said, they wrote so incredibly captivating?
I want to know – I want to know – I want to know!!!
When that frame of mind begins to set in, a subtle realignment happens; refining your craft ceases to be a chore, but instead a higher aspiration; work becomes play, and practice becomes meaningful in ways that it never had before – something valuable for the possibilities that it unlocks within a person’s soul and something valuable enough that you would set forth on the journey of writing even if the chance of a reward was that of a snowflake’s right to exist in an inferno – and thus you refine ceaselessly no matter where you are, what you are doing, wherever you are, without anyone telling you to do so; before you know it, you are directing the ship and improving for your sake, not mine.
It’s strange that it’s through that frame of enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake that a person might be best able to reap the external rewards of an A*, isn’t it?
To go above, one must first go below.
It is a strange irony.
