Writing and Wellbeing
Author Anne Spencer Morrow (wife of Charles Lindbergh) put her finger on a fundamental truth when she observed, “Writing is more than living, as it is being conscious of living.” Even (maybe especially) the young diarist knows how the blank page can be a wonderful way to “work things out.” No audience is necessary, or even desired. The privacy, the very anonymity of it all, invites thought on fire. Some continue the therapeutic practice throughout their adult years.
Highland member and our session lead participant Lucy Flood knows all about this, having cofounded Write To Thrive, a reflective and creative writing-based enterprise that taps into the state-of-the-art research on the benefits of writing for mental, physical and emotional wellness (click: How Journaling Can Help You In Hard Times). Be open to a transformation that goes beyond the self, however, as the principles apply equally to the transformation of entire social and professional communities when people take time to reflect and write together.
Be also not afraid to at least explore what might open up with this kinder/gentler stream-of-consciousness writing technique – a far cry from the Hemingway-esque machismo description (“There's nothing to the act of writing, all you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed”) that we’d previously discussed in our MM 6/6/19 On Writing session.
No bloodletting here as we might simply explore how the writing process might tease out our own capacity for mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing even with a readership limited to the self. But, as they say, you don’t know what you don’t know when it comes to where it could go beyond there.
Years ago the library at Frasier Meadows contained fascinating memoirs of residents having lived lives just as full as yours, all with the backdrop of The Great Depression and WWII. Per Faulkner, the past is never dead, it’s not even past. Some of those accounts provided some much-needed perspective and comfort given our own “interesting times.”
Just remember your own present will be some future’s past. Maybe this is your chance to write its first draft.