the meditation of writing..

At the writing workshop yesterday, I did some work. Some writing. I don't remember the last time I actually took pen to paper and wrote more than a page of words. Sentences. Thoughts. Feelings. It was nice. My hand hurt at the end of it, but seeing my bad handwriting splurged all over the page made me realize why I was there. One of the exercises was to write about smells. This is what I jotted down:


The first day of school smell is what I always called it. Brisk. Chilly. Excitement. Optimistic. My fall jacket is on. Black and white British Knights laced up. Backpack on my back with my noon lunch keeping warm in my brown bag tucked under my textbooks and the record I borrowed from my friend last June. The smell would slowly drift away the closer I got to school. The smell would be replaced by the school hallway smell. Optimistic. Excited. Brisk. Chilly. The AC in public schools sucked in the 80s. That first day smell zoomed by quickly. The first day of anything seemed to always zoom by when you were a kid, huh? The second day of school smell matched the rest of the year. Till June. Anxiety. Laziness. Anticipation. The sticky smell would travel with you for all the fights, exams, class dances, lunches, rain days, pizza days, class trips. Birthdays. Then there was the First day of Summer smell. But that's a whole different story. The first day of school smell was bitter sweet, but I always looked forward to it full of Excitement.

The exercise was to just let the pen flow for ten minutes. Write whatever. Not worrying about the grammar, the language. Full sentences. This is an old writers trick, actually, but most of us stop doing it when we have important things to work on. I try to work this theory every time I write on here, but it's the editor in me that takes over. Correcting. Erasing. Re-phrasing. The tool was to not worry about all that. And just write. It was great to write again.