What is yours will wait for you

holding ideas like stars

Night with Her Train of Stars, by Edward Robert Hughes

General announcement: I have fallen a bit out of rhythm with writing these posts, and I apologize for that! I am realizing that I do not have the time for weekly posts right now—and I’m hoping that you all might appreciate that, because frankly, I can’t keep up with other people’s weekly posts! So, for the foreseeable future, I will aim to publish The Tangled Path every other week. Accordingly, I’m reducing the cost of being a paid subscriber, though I will try to make most posts free. If you’re interested in supporting my work, I would be deeply grateful, but I also want to make sure it’s accessible to as many people as possible. Ideas are for everyone :)

I have been scattered lately—for a variety of reasons—and when I return to my beloved Secret Project that I’m writing, I sometimes feel like I am coaxing stars to roost in the palm of my hand. Somehow, through me, those stars will make a constellation I cannot quite yet see. It’s thrilling to hold them, but sometimes I feel guilty. I’m sorry I don’t have more time for you, I whisper to them.

But here is a thing I have learned. If something is for you—if it is yours, however you like to think about that, say as a contract that you’ve made with a project, or a destined moment in an otherwise free-willed life—if that something is for you, it won’t leave you. You might leave it. I have walked away from stories, left them silently entombed in computer files after a rain of tears, given up on them in frustration and embarrassment and not-good-enoughness.

Sometimes, that’s it. I still recall an unsettling moment or two when I heard about another story or novel with an eerily similar premise to one that I had abandoned. Were these ideas “stolen”? No, I don’t think so—what is an idea but a wild thing, a spark that is seeking someone who can breathe it into life?¹

Yet, I have to say that these occasions are rare. More often, I return to stories after months or years (even a decade or more!) and find they are still whispering to me. Some essential life flares within them and I can still feel my own self rising to meet it. Often, I don’t know what to do about it, or I sense that the timing is not yet right, but it’s enough to sense the aliveness of these stories and ideas. I write them in a notebook like a promise. I will come for you.

Recently I wrote down every single story that I found on my computer and felt had a spark. There were 20 of them! (All novels, so help me.) For some, their energy did not feel like a match for my own, yet I could feel that we might flow together in future. Others, though, seemed to reach for me, wrapping me up in their arms. I had to gently disentangle myself. Soon, I told them. Soon.

If you are creative, and we are all creative, sometimes it’s hard not to want to bring everything to life right now. Everything, all at once! But that’s impossible for most of us. The river of life intervenes; currents branch; new tributaries flow into the main stream. We might steer the ship, but still, it is life that carries us. We don’t always know when our currents will bring us to certain shores, but we can fill our proverbial boats with everything we think we might need.

It might not feel like it at the time, but if something is yours, it will wait for you. Ideas have a patience that humans don’t, except for sometimes when they burn through like shooting stars and demand to be made, now, immediately, without pause. Most of the time, though, their approach is leisurely. Working with them is like entering a relationship: you must get to know them, must listen and take their counsel. Sometimes it takes years to really hear them. (The idea for my Secret Project first came to me more than a decade ago!)

And who knows? If ideas aren’t brought to life in this lifetime, maybe they return to us the next time around. Maybe we never lose them; maybe they wait patiently as long as they need to, until we are ready to speak, or write, or make, or dance, or sound them into existence.

Your stories are waiting for you. Your ideas will be there when you are ready for them. Sometimes to bring them to life, you must live yourself.

1. Elizabeth Gilbert has gathered some incredible examples of ideas hopping from one person to another in her wonderful book Big Magic.