Every life is a rich one for a writer

It’s because writing is experiential. It’s about deepening yourself into experience, abandoning yourself into whatever moment you’re in with such fearlessness that you can report back. So you can come back and entrance others with your witness to what you’ve lived.

Even the boring, slow as summer in August days in the South bring manifold treasures.

(Though, as you know, there are no boring moments. Only incurious minds.)

As a long-time writer I’ve never felt any moment was unworthy. There are moments I’d rather not live twice — that birthday of mine last summer when I spent 12 hours upheaving in Iowa from something I’d eaten in Nebraska; when I lost my girlfriend to a friend in high school, and found out it had been going on for weeks; those desperate minutes I was coiled in rope under an upended sailboat . . . 

Yet not one of those moments was unworthy of being lived. And relished for what it was. 

I used to think it’s because I’m a writer that I find all of experience so meaningful. Now — after having spoken to dozens of writers — I know it has nothing to do with it. 

It’s only this: If you’re attentive you’ll find something pulsating in every unexciting, unthrilling, unsexy moment. 

If you’re attentive you’ll discover everything vibrates around you. 

There’s a hum in the deadest of spaces. There’s vitality in the dreariest of locales. 

And that’s sexy. In a cosmic tapped-in way. In a universe-loves-you kind of way.

You are that way. 

For you —

Evan Griffith
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