📿 Writing And Tumbling Forward In Process

Some thoughts on becoming

Hello you — Adreanna here for this week’s dispatch of The Laundry,

One of the most enjoyable things I’ve found about writing a book is that every now and then, people quote me back to myself. Does that make me sound like a narcissist? Maybe. Except that I recognize that it’s not “me” that’s being quoted back to myself, but rather an imprint of who I was and what I was thinking at a particular juncture in time. A book is a written photograph. It’s a means of catching a thought in process and freezing it in time.

When someone quotes my book, I get the same feeling that I might when reading my high school journals. I feel a tenderness for who I’ve been, and how all that I was experiencing then has helped to shape the person who sits here now — on a Thursday afternoon— creating another indelible stamp of my thoughts.

Maybe this is an entering middle aged thing. I have some years of tracks laid behind me to reflect on now. Or maybe it’s because I have the privilege of watching my OWN young child unfurl into ever fuller expressions of herself. At a year and half old, she becomes more fully herself each day. In either case, I have a visceral sense of just how fluid I have the potential to be. How fluid we all have the potential to be when we stay open to our experiences, and allow them them to change us. When we let life continually mold us like soft clay in it’s palms.

I guess in Buddhist terms we might call this “impermanence of self” or “non-self”. It’s the recognition that I’m just tumbling day over day into my own potentiality. I’m less of a solid, static, separate “me” than I perceive myself to be when I’m brushing my teeth in the mirror. At my essence, I’m more of a process than a result. I’m more of a verb than a noun. I’m something perpetually in motion. We all are. Just go back and read your high school journals and then tell me how life has shaped you.