It’s been a while. Lots of things have happened. The ups and downs of life, the lull versus the harried. Lots more harried in the last few months, with more to come, probably.

What I have found, which I already knew to a great extent, is that writing calms me. It feeds me. And more importantly, it helps me solve problems. So in times when I have no time to write, or I am not feeling in a writing mood. Or I am feeling too overwhelmed by negative events around me to put fingers to keys: yes, these are the times I most need to write.

But what tends to happen is that instead of reaching for that much needed salve, something that not only will get me through the day, but will also remedy sticky situations by injecting some much-needed reflection, is that I run around in circles, ineffectually trying to deal with difficult situations that would do well with some writing-led erudition.

The excuse for not writing is usually that I don’t have any ideas. But of course, I already know that even if I have no ideas in my writing bag, they always come once I begin to write. There is an element of the illusion of activity playing a role in resolving difficult situations, and this means action, not writing. Writing seems so passive, so kind of useless in the face of diabolical dilemmas. But then I find myself not sleeping at night, waking at 2 or 3AM and my mind working overtime to ‘think’ myself out of the problems that face me. Proof that I need to work through the situation, and if I am not going to write, then my brain is not going to let me off the hook. Either way, I need to devote time to thinking and reflection, and the best way to do that is to write myself out of the hole.

And then there is another thing. When you stop writing, the distance between you and your last piece becomes greater. The less you write, the less the chance that you will start writing again on any given day. Each day, the odds decrease. Each day you alienate yourself a little more from writing. Each day you become a little more disconnected with your inner self. Then you begin to forget what happened. You can’t remember the timeline, so that if you write, you are not working through things as they happened, but you are piling everything up in one mountain of ideas and feelings that is like a gigantic, tangled  ball of wool that’s been irreparably tangled.

So, write, I tell myself. It doesn’t have to be a great deal of words. Just a few will do. Make a start,  I tell myself, and now that I have I feel a little more like I’ve rejoined the main road and can continue the journey…