Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Two or three feet ahead


I happened upon a quotation today that inspired me. A lot of the time, with my cello, my career and my life, I want to be one step ahead. I want to know what is going to happen. We all want to know the future, but it's easy to get hung up with fears, doubts, and sometimes just a lot of speculating.


This quote, by Anne Lamott, in "Bird by Bird" (a famous writing guide), tells us that we don't have to know. She writes:


E. L Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.


I encountered this same issue in the novel I'm reading. It's Robin McKinley;'s "The Blue Sword." Harry, the fantasy heroine, is really in the fog about what's going on in the strange world she's thrown into.


She says: It is that I cannot see what I am doing or why, and it is unsettling always to live only in the moment as it passes. Oh, I know - one never sees ahead or behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not.


The seer in the book answers back: It is a reasonable wish. No one lives more than a few moments either way.


I find it hard to give up all my speculating and live each moment and each day. But knowing is not really a choice we are given. Listening, though, we can do. and knowing just two or three feet ahead of us.