“The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.” Jacques Benigne Bossuel
The world may demand an explanation, but you don’t have to provide it. If you always need a reason to do things, you might never try anything.
Who knows why you’re drawn to the sounds of an electric sitar or why you feel the need to write the same, odd phrase on every scrap of paper you can find? Who has to know?
All that really matters is your need to pursue these things. Maybe they’ll make sense later; maybe they won’t, but discard them and this is certain: nothing will ever come of them.
Besides, who can explain the crazy love we have for our children, or the way our hearts respond to beauty, or why we find something beautiful at all? Do we need an explanation?
The first thing I ever drew in one of my notebooks was a spiral. I didn’t know why. I just drew it, and then I drew more of them.
Pretty soon, without explanation, I was drawing spirals everywhere. Then, one day, I wrote the following words beside one of them:
“This is the shape of my life.”
I realized my life always circled around the same themes: a desire to write, a need to create something, a longing to help others do the same.
No matter how far I roamed, I always wandered back to the center of my true interests and my real hopes and dreams. No matter how hard I tried to be someone else, I wound up just wanting to be me.
Trace all of this and you’ll notice a pattern. It’s a spiral.
If I’d resisted that urge to draw spirals simply because it made no sense to do so, I might’ve never had that realization. And it was that realization that helped me decide to stop fighting myself.
Do what you must, even if you don’t know why at first. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to move you toward your center.
Think. Draw. Write.
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