When pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart said ‘courage is the price life exacts for peace’, it’s too easy to say she was talking about flying. What she was talking about was the longing of the human heart. My kids grew up with an Amelia poster on our wall. It said: ‘when an adventure’s offered, you don’t refuse’. For some the adventure is flying. For others it is traveling. For countless among us, including the flyers and travlers, it is a longing to write. You are who this post is for.
That calling within you to write. You know it. You long to tend to it. You ignore it.
You are not alone. In ten years of offering writing workshops to new and unpublished writers, I have learned just about everyone longs to write something, and just about everyone needs guidance, encouragement and support to start.
We long to write. With all our heart, we long to write a story of some kind. Whether we want others to read it or not, whether we write for ourselves or we write to share, the fact is we have stories inside us bursting for release.
And still we hold them back. We deny ourselves our right to write. We deny the world our story. We withhold. We shrink. And we not only do not grow, we cannot grow. And yet the soul, the soul longs to grow. And no doubt about it, writing grows us. Writing expands us. It leads us places we did or didn’t dream exist. It takes us on an excursion into our own interior that will surprise, delight and break our hearts. And still the soul will grow.
Abandoned, however, the soul will haunt us. The longing to write will not leave us alone. No matter where we turn or who we turn to, sometimes soft, sometimes unbearably deep, the incessant nagging will follow along with us. Because the soul longs to grow.
Writing grows us because it takes courage to pick up the pen and claim our right to write. And it takes a funny sort of confidence to believe we have what it takes to put that pen to paper. And it is a sublime act of lunacy to believe others may want to read what we write.
And in the end none of it matters – except that we did it. We wrote.
We wrote for no other reason than the soul was calling us to write.
We celebrated for no other reason than we grew.
We grew and we knew peace.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist, author and founder of the International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute. In 2014 she launched The Write Road, a wellbeing-through-writing initiative for rural and remote Australians. She is passionate about pilgrimage, and in 2017 founded Walk&Write holiday writing adventures.