existential crisis, no waiting

As long as it is, the Ocean Beach pier comes to an end. Sometimes, the end
of one part of life and the beginning of another feels like climbing up on the
railing and deciding whether or not jumping in is the best option we have.

One of my students has been wrapped up in a very necessary and necessarily unproductive dialogue about productivity and skill recently.

As a senior, he's experiencing that crushing convergence of the future becoming the present as college comes to an end before it has actually ended (read: every day brings a new question about what he's going to be while there's still a lot of heavy lifting left to do in the classes he has left).

That moment. It hits us all at some point, whether or not we went to school. In an instant as short as a minute or as long as several years, the potential of our future moves, almost instantaneously it seems, into a much closer orbit with our present reality, upending those tides within us that we've grown accustomed to. We've learned their rhythm, their cadence, their constancy.

But the end of college, like other ends we have or will experience, presses against our shores insistently. All seems immediate, seems pressing, seems imposing. And this, I believe, is where my student is treading water at the moment. Between now and then, awash in the lack of either.

And what I want to tell him is to stay there as long as he can. Because, if what he's discovered recently is any evidence, there is something in the discomfort that is preparing him for what comes next.

An example. Recently, he tweeted me the following: "The biggest thing I learned from our department was producing good writing instincts/habits can't be quantified, only shown."

This sounds like a small discovery until you realize the arduous road young writers travel to find their voice and purpose. Unlike math, where the proper formula likely exists for the work you're doing, in writing there is merely the desire, not an established path, to become what you will.

A comparison - a degree in accounting, when discovered, never leads to the question, "So, what are you going to do with that?" A degree in writing is, in itself, an open question that, in some ways, will never be answered. At least, never in convincing fashion.

So, for writers, the first existential crisis comes early. What can I say? We're precocious that way. And the discovery that my student just made - that the internal measures of a writer's work come before the external - is one of the most critical steps forward in the face of so much uncertainty.

It's also, in some ways, a form of bravery to admit so much depends upon our red wheelbarrow. Here's how I responded. I'll paraphrase a bit to compensate for Twitter's character limitations.

Learning to write works best when conceived as a long, solo hike in the wilderness. We are alone until we meet others on the trail. When we do, we should walk a ways with them, talk with them a ways. But we also need to part with those we meet regularly, intentionally taking in long stretches of the trail alone in communion with our own experience.