For the past few months I have felt as though I had very little to say. Not that whatever writing talent I might have was gone, per se, just that I had nowhere to direct it.
Writing about writing is not particularly interesting to me, and I doubt it makes for riveting reading, either. But consider this an explanation, or possibly an apology, for going so far off the steady newsletter schedule lately.
There has been one instructive piece in all this, which is learning—or perhaps re-learning, as this all has happened before—what it takes for me to get out of ruts like this one. As is so often the case, it basically took a whole lot of reading for me to find anything worth writing about. The passage that really opened me up was this one, which comes from choreographer Martha Graham:
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
That first sentence is an awfully big relief. And the rest of it is pretty sound advice, too. So in my concerted effort not to force myself to do anything but stay open and aware of those motivating urges, what I found was a whole lot of what are called desire paths.
A desire path is simply a walkway that emerges organically as people try to make their own choices about how best to get from point A to point B. These are not the planned and paved paths put in by the city or village adminstration, but typically more direct ones, or at least more interesting ones, carved by nothing but the tramping of feet. You can usually see the desire path and the prescribed path at the same time, I’ve found. Something the whole human race probably has in common is a willingness to do our own thing. Especially when given a chance to prove we’re smarter than the bureaucrats.
Once I learned the term, and the phenomenon, I began to see desire paths everywhere. Surely I had noticed them on some level, and certainly used them, at many points in the past. But sometimes you just need someone to point out something obvious, and then it clicks forever.
One of the most famous instances of a desire path exists at my alma mater, The Ohio State University. When the Oval—our version of a quad—was first laid out, there were no sidewalks or paved paths within it. In fact, it wasn’t even planned as a quad; it just happened that way based on the order that buildings began to be constructed on campus. You can probably guess where this is going. Rather than maintain a pristine (and therefore useless) green space in the center of all this activity, students began trekking directly over the grass, in mostly-straight lines that delivered them efficiently to the library, their classrooms, and their dorms.
Rather than attempt to rewire the DNA of the student body by building sidewalks where the original campus planners had proposed, the school instead laid most of the official pathways exactly where students had shown they wanted them. The desire paths, including “the Long Walk” that stretches unbroken between the Oval’s east and west ends, became instutionalized.
That Ohio State is famous for its desire paths seems fitting, really. My time there was marked by nothing if not a burgeoning sense of my own desires. A bursting in my chest, wanting the whole world at once, ready to run in any and every direction until I figured out who I was.
All that has been tempered now—tempered, not ended—and the desires are different. I used to want to be some kind of wandering hero. Now I just want to be part of something bigger than myself, something worth fighting for. And I’ve learned that in life, just as in walking, you can either stick to the prescribed path or you can keep yourself open, wandering with desire and intent but without force or prescription.
It’s nice to follow where others have led. We’re all just singing karaoke, aren’t we? Trying to emulate people who have come before us, people we admire, people who seemed to have it all figured out. In our walking or writing or teaching or singing or parenting or consoling or painting or loving. And in the absence of any ideas of our own this can occasionally be a great comfort—that someone else did figure it out, and if we pretend to be them for long enough we, too, might make our own way eventually.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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