Are the Patterns in Your Life Trying to Tell You Something?

My oldest writing memory goes back to second grade at the age of seven. I wrote a one page story about a clown.

I remember my mother putting the story on a high shelf and telling me she wanted to save it. She knew then that I would be a writer.

Her belief in me planted a seed and I started to think of myself as one who writes even at the age of seven.

My Writing Pattern

By fourth grade I found myself carrying around notebooks and writing nature poems.

I found my inspiration on our small farm in the Missouri countryside where I grew up. The rolling hills were covered with fields and creeks and forest.

My brothers and I roamed them nearly every day. As we headed out the door we would yell, "We're going exploring." The only rule was that we had to be back by dinner time.

I would often go wandering on my own and take my notebook with me. I would find a big oak somewhere to lean against, close my eyes and let the afternoon sun warm my face.

I had no way to express the feelings I had about that place except through poetry. I felt safe. Alive. Connected.

A few years later when teachers began assigning reports, I remember wanting to use our old manual typewriter to type my own report.

Of course, I didn't know how to type, but I hoisted it onto the little pale blue school desk my Mom had acquired for a couple dollars in a surplus sale at my elementary school.

I pulled my chair up tight against the desk with the lamplight streaming down over the typewriter and my face.

I began to peck the keys.

I felt alive, excited, like God himself, insomuch as God is a creator and I, too, felt like all the world's possibilities lay at my fingertips.

Writing always feels that way to me.

Do You Know What Possibility Feels Like?

Do you know what it's like to feel—to feel possibility? To feel that anything is possible? To feel like you are the master creator?

In a world where it is so easy to be overwhelmed, uncertain, and disconnected, writing is a place of pregnant possibility.

Can you relate to the feelings I describe?

Your personal story is, no doubt, different, but I suspect that you've felt something like this from a very young age, a pull. Like a siren, it calls to you, even when your life is preoccupied by job, family, money or a thousand other things.

When you return to writing and begin to create again, you realize it was calling to you all along.

Most people don't understand, but you do.

What Are Your Patterns?

We can often learn a lot about ourselves by looking back over the span of our lives and identifying patterns—patterns of behavior, recurring desires, interests which keep popping up.

Maybe you've always known you're a writer, that there is nothing else for you.

That clarity is a gift.

Most of us, including myself, have always wanted to write, but taken different paths in life.

I was always deciding between science and writing.

When I entered college I didn't know if I wanted to major in physics or English. Luckily, a counselor told me I didn't have to decide. So I pursued both.

Yes, I got a lot of funny looks when I told people I was studying physics and English. Eventually, unable to see a career path as a writer I attended graduate school in physics and earned my Ph.D.

Stories, essays, poems, journal entries, they are all dribbled across my life. Occassionally a friend will return a piece to me that I had long forgotten.

There is a pattern of writing in my life and when I'm not feeding that desire to write, I feel like something is missing. I never feel more content or more full of purpose than when I'm writing on a regular basis.

What path did you choose? Did marriage and family divert you from writing? Were you distracted by the practical desk job or the first thing that would pay the bills? It's tough to find the time to write when your life is already full...but it can be done.

Maybe it's time to let writing become a more integral part of your life rather than just something you do once in a while. I'm here to tell you that it's possible. Your stories and your unique perspective can make a difference.

What are your patterns? Is it time to commit yourself more fully to writing?

Perhaps PieceWorx Writing Studio can help. Free 30-Day Trial.