Freestyle

Well my dears, you may have noticed that I have been a little more prolific than usual this week.

That is because I have been on holiday, trying to rest up from my shoulder operation and trying to recover from the stresses and strains of a hectic few weeks. I am amazed how tiring swinging my arms in circles has been. It may be doing wonders for the joints, but I am positively exhausted.

I wanted to try and get back into a writing routine while I was home, so I started doing the “Just 5 Minute” exercises in Joanne Klassen’s book. Today I did some freestyle writing.

“But, EBL!” I hear you cry. “Pretty much all your writing is freestyle writing!”

That is well-observed, my clever readers, but still not quite the same thing. It is true I tend to produce a stream-of-consciousness for the blog, but it is minimally edited for sense and spelling (mostly); meanwhile the freestyle writing was a timed exercise without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Well, maybe repetition.

What I find when I do freestyle exercises is that they are quite liberating. I can write what I want and know it is completely private. As a result it is possible that I express a thought that was not otherwise immediately obvious to my conscious brain.

Today my tremendous nugget of earth shattering consequence was simply that writing is my personal path to peace. Not all my writing, you will be relieved to learn, appears on this blog. Let me tell you, there are scribbled pages in notebooks and files in folders which will never go further, and that is as it should be. However, the strength of feeling I had about the value I place on being able to write most, if not every, day was a little unexpected. Really I should know by now!

So tell me, my dears, how does writing feed your soul? Does it soothe you, or energise you, or both, or neither. Is it your addiction or friend or demon in the night? Or all of them?

Namaste