Now that I have done this for an entire year, there must be something that has changed. I have the same question as any person observing this needless pursuit. But nothing feels different. My imagination got the better of me, perhaps. It has been a year. I am still writing. Now, I finally sit and ask myself the question: why? I have no answer yet, so I assume I must write more to get there. A year has given me the courage to ask the question; another may bring the answer. It has been a year. There is little else to say.
Countless hours of devouring cups of coffee have amounted to about two hundred thousand words—the good ones. God knows how many have succumbed to the reject pile, how many have suffocated under the pressure of not being just right. I’ve wasted more sentences on this journey than I have ever uttered in my life. There is something in that. At least, I’d like to think so; else, this was all a futile mission doomed from its inception. Writers often waste more words than they use, and the threshold for this is different on a case-by-case basis. Some are precise writers—they know the correct words spontaneously and instantly. I am not like them. I often avoid reading these glimpses of my life because I know there is always a better word in hindsight—a better word, a better pursuit, a better decision.
It takes a smart man to know where he is going, but it takes an honest one to admit he has no clue, and I have forever been more honest than I have been smart. I wish there was a fitting conclusion. For all I know, I have but tested myself. It has been an exercise in patience. Looking back, all my life has been an exercise in patience. Of all the things I do well—a list on which writing these words rank much lower than one would expect—it is waiting and working aimlessly that I do best. Waiting and working is all I know. I reckon that is all this is: a test of how far I can go with it.
That, or the making of something greater than I can ever imagine. I would never know. I look around, and I see so many people; I may as well be the stranger I look at when I walk down the street—nameless for so many, faceless for others, existing, working and waiting.