Tuesday 11 February 2020

That inextinguishable love for the written word

I have now lost count of the number of 'breaking hiatus' and comeback posts that I have written.
But that also indicates an important thing to me. That my love for writing is an inextinguishable flame within. It sometimes flickers, sometimes rages and at other times just quietly burns. It never dies.

In fact, I wouldn't say I have not been writing at all. As a much loved hobby and therapeutic exercise that it is, it comes out in everything from whats app messages that I write, communication write ups that I write for some interest groups that I am part of and sometimes just in the chats with my sister :)

The same goes for reading too. While I had plenty of time to dedicate to reading as a child, teenager and a carefree single woman, with a household to run by myself and a kid who is a handful to manage, reading time has taken a hit too. But it is yet another constant flame within.

It visits me like a long lost friend when I see a shelf full of books unexpectedly at a holiday resort and I end up choosing a bunch of them and getting them to the room to read. In our recent family holiday to a small lakeside resort near Dindugul in Tamil Nadu, a treasure chest of books was kept in the dining area. After every meal, I would bring back a couple of them :) I got to  finish a very interesting and short translated work. And RK Narayan's American diaries got me hooked. I marked it as 'to read', got back home and never thought about it until now, as I write this.

Nevertheless, I consider that inextinguishable love for reading and writing as a blessing. It is something that saves me ever so often form the trials of life and even the dreary feelings of mundane existence. It shows up magically to sprinkle pixie dust on times that are hard or just not that exciting. A good read reaches my hand and am suddenly drowned in a journey of someone, someplace far away.

I have several unwritten posts by now - ruminations, travel stories, book reviews. I probably cannot even recollect enough to be able to write about them now. But its never too late or too little.

Just like the sudden urge to write that translated into this post, I hope to be able to do my reading and writing in various forms all through my life. And in the meanwhile, may I get that discipline to come to this space and write regularly , more for myself than anything else.

So long! 

2 comments:

  1. Good luck with writing more! I too go through spurts of writing a lot, then relapsing into silence for months. However since last year, I made it one of my personal goals to write more consistently and have pinned up the list of goals near my laptop so it stares me in the face everyday and forces me to write!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thats a good idea Aparna! Hope I manage become regular too.

      Delete