The pen is in our hands and the paper sits spread before us. The words are waiting to be penned. All of that’s there. But in the writing what’s often missing is not the pen or the paper. What’s missing is thought.
We’re not thoughtful. Rather, we’re reactive. It’s the negative that drives our reactive responses. When something negative hits us we instantly go on red-alert, our senses our heightened, and we leap to a flight-or-flight mentality. Subsequently, the pen starts to move and the paper is scrawled with negative. And as the pages accumulate, our lives take on this ever-increasingly negative tone.
At some point we need to set down the pen, push the paper aside, adjust the negative out of the lens of our life, and then write again. Here’s some suggestions as to how we begin to do that:
Write About What You Can Do, Not What You Can’t
It is in exercising our strengths that we overcome our weaknesses. We have this tendency to focus on the weaknesses, thinking that in dealing with them directly we will directly diminish them. Yet, as with many of our backward strategies, it is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.
Write About What’s Possible, Not What’s Impossible
We pen stories about the obstacles, the mountains, the barriers and the raging rivers that effectively block our paths. It’s about the magnitude of the obstacle, not the imagination that circumvents it. It’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us. We focus on the reasons why we ‘can’t’ at the expense of the far greater reasons why we ‘can’. And what’s possible becomes impossible only because we’ve chosen it to be so.
Write About Things That Are Bigger Than You
We tend to pen our stories in ways that keep things our size or smaller. We don’t want to risk stepping outside of the box or pressing the envelope out so far that we’re going to find ourselves in a place that we can’t retreat from. Rather, we need to step outside of ourselves, leap a fence or two, and realize that the places we land might not be as safe as we’d like them to be, but they’re often quite beautiful and somewhat exciting.
Write About a Dream, Not Just an Idea
We’re filled with ideas, and the pages of our lives are likewise filled with them. But what those pages often lack are dreams. Dreams are ideas where the collar has been removed and the leash has been thrown away. Write big. Write without constraints. Write across the pages of your life in bold relief. Write like a master not a miser.
Write a Rewrite
Maybe it’s time for rewrite. Maybe it’s time to grab these points, pick up a new page and write differently. It’s time to change your story, and in the changing to change your life.
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC