The Zen of Writing

Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.  

Homer Simpson

From what I’ve learned about Zen Buddhism (it’s been a long lockdown) it’s incumbent on us as individuals to allow our feelings to be – whether they be negative or positive. We should welcome them, even unpleasant thoughts that grip us by the throat and won’t let go. If, for instance, a writer receives a knockback on her totally brilliant piece of work, how should she process this?

What to do when we know full well that the earth is round, but are finding it to be awfully flat at the moment an editor or publisher says ‘no’ to our contribution.

Fear of being rejected can apply to anyone: the job applicant, the lover, a teenager waiting for a party invite that may never come. In mindfulness philosophy, it’s what we do with these feelings that counts. 

Samuel Beckett has famously advised writers to ‘fail better’. It worked for him. After years of struggling, he produced the acclaimed theatrical work Waiting for Godot. Now the playwright is ‘waiting’ for the rest of us to catch-up, gathering our work in our arms and turn it into a fine bouquet of multi-coloured roses.

Zen practitioner Joseph Goldstein explains that in meditation he can become paralysed with fear. Only when he allows space for that fear does it loosen its hold. ‘If I feel this fear [read: anxiety, sadness, disappointment] for the rest of my life,’ he says to himself, ‘it’s okay’. Once he’s ceased shoving the emotion away, the future looks frightening.

Paradoxically, by seeking a state of equanimity in the face of acceptance or rejection, we writers are better able to find the purity in what we want to express, and then move on.

As a writer I work on choosing equanimity every day. Sometimes even, the idea of failing ‘better’ can have a strangely illuminating and liberating effect.