Do you badger yourself?

I’m always on my case, chastising my laziness, bemoaning my sloth. It gets tiresome. These daily missives are supposed to be warm-ups for some big worthy work. At day’s end, before mixing our Negronis, I assess what I’ve achieved since breakfast. A pittance! Am I serious about my calling or not!

I readily concede my quarrel’s nuts. No publisher pants for my output, no wolf waits at our door. I’m not prophetically possessed by some truth to impart. Jane and I are retired, we’ve done our work, why not kick back?

A story is told about Thomas Aquinas who, till age fifty, was a writing machine. He had a lot to say day in, day out, till one day – December 6, 1273 – he experienced an ecstasy and called it quits. When his scribe begged him to resume, Thomas replied, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.” I know the feeling. God may not be lashing me to scribble, but something is.

What something? With my missives, it’s no mystery: I’m saying hi to friends, enjoying a stroll, schmoozing about what comes to mind. My motives are wholly amiable and amative. Ten years of producing these daily for the hell of it exonerates me of practical ambition.

But what about all those other words I exude – or never get around to? Why beat myself up?

Partly, I’m guessing, it’s dread of nonentity. Writing I’m conversing – with you tomorrow or some fantasized fan decades hence. Conversing one isn’t useless, one’s participating, collaborating, holding one’s end up. (Reading, too, one is doing something helpful, hauling an author from some murky yesterday into the light of today.)

Partly, I write to occupy myself. Writing these days is pretty much all I do beside making meals and walking Henry. If I did not write, I’d feel worthless, loathe myself. Writing I’m having fun. I can’t wait to hear what I’ll say or how I’ll say it. My results may not delight but the anticipation tingles, as on boyhood’s Christmas morning before the doors opened. My ink in advance is magic in the stalk of my pen, less after it flows.

I write to discover. Sentences tug like Henry by his leash. (In Henry’s case we’re working on obedience.) I have no idea what I think until I’ve written. I must chew experience for nourishment as a cow its cud.

I write – this is hardest to explain – for radiance. Sometimes a phrase I’ve made, even a paragraph, strikes me as concisely, astonishingly right, a bowling ball toppling every pin. I gaze amazed: I made that?! This doesn’t happen often but when it does the high is crack cocaine. I suspect fishermen feel this way, after torpor the tug.

I write, too, because it feels good to have written. Call this the prayer effect. I’ve given all I possess, laid it on the altar in homage and gratitude, as a farmer might his crop. I’m sorry it’s not better, but if it’s my best, can more be asked?

These motives sound mystical, even whacky, as I set them down, but don’t we all have some activity that answers that impossible question, “Why am I here?” We’re here to do our job, help our neighbor, lower our handicap, bake a better cake. Whether we’re saving the world or collecting pink pebbles, our self-justifications are absurd. The world cannot be saved and there aren’t enough pink pebbles to sate a soul.

There are never enough words or good enough but as in kindergarten it’s the effort grade that counts.