The hardest thing about being a writer is holding onto that rare feeling of being justified in your pursuit of it. It does not immediately strike one as the proper profession, as it is important for the Buddhist to have the proper profession. For it can seem like no profession at all. But, it's true: know thyself and you will learn all there is to know.

There is no real blueprint for it, and in the quest to find things to write about we are sometimes led astray. (One does have a certain affection for those writers who, probably in order to write, must go out on some big adventure far away, to return and capture the outlandishness of foreign lands, in a fit of sophistication. Seductively fun, but, maybe not a bad idea to stay out of their bedroom. Not to say that there is anything necessarily wrong with the unexpected.) Adopting the work style of someone else might be useful to gain a foothold, but at a certain point, imitation must stop. The authentic must come through, one way or another. Of course it's fine if something you read reminds you of something you might already know. Keats, I think, described learning as this process, imagining what we already know. In this sense, Buddha knew a lot.

I suppose it's natural for a form of writing to evolve. What was once a favorite form maybe changes a bit. We outgrow Ernest Hemingway, as well we should. (His sense of self-justification as a writer came, thanks largely to events, when he was young.) And yet, some of it we keep, in so far as it is, again, useful.

We live and exist in a timeless world, free of strife. Kindness is the energy force behind the world. Some times, as we bumble through into adulthood, we fall a bit out of alignment. Some times it is that, not necessarily out of the worst intentions, we lay down with dogs and get our fleas. Fortunate it is that kindness always draws us back, as into a fold.

I don't think one should feel ashamed for being an adult who finds writing important and worth doing. It is, after all, a gentle way of putting a point of view out there, for someone to be persuaded by it on its own merits if it has merits of truth. That seems to be the way Lincoln did it, presenting the point in its simplest form possible, as a house divided against itself cannot stand. He knew what that quote meant, and applied to his own logic as well as the logic of what he was arguing at the time.

The thing about writing is that by doing it you discover something new and simple, as if uncovering something engraved upon a stone that had been covered by the sands of time. You look down at it, the words carefully put down, and smile, and say to yourself happily, 'someone wrote that.' A fallible person, knowing himself to be fallible, wrote down a thought that had for him stood the various tests within, ones we tend to call time. That someone took the timeless sense of being present in a day, one day, now, and had the simple wisdom to write something. Wise people write, but one well imagines, that even idiots have their day as thinkers, maybe because they know themselves as idiots. Idiots too can find alignment with the force of life and love, and find themselves transformed. And then when they got out into the world, in their own idiot style, they know a great and lovely secret, that no matter what someone else might say or do or cast upon them a certain look, that they are not idiots to be who they are, no, not at all, but rather the opposite, and armed with a knowledge that the first person who might say, 'oh, look at that funny hair, those dreadful pants, that horrible occupation,' is hiding from something, ignoring something within their own selves.

Having the proper profession, and knowing it to be so, changes everything. No longer does one pursue the things he does not have, and goes out into the world as a simple ray of affectionate light to shine as gently as he can stand it. Which is indeed venturing out into a world of adventures, small as they may seem to be.

What did I do with my life and my education? I wandered around the edges of a city like a lost person, but kept my eyes open, and found some contact with a simple story teller who lives at the edge of the world, and says to you, quietly, gently, with kindness, 'look, there is a little story there,' like a little kid being brave, or the smile of a funny-looking person who is not vain, or a shy person looking at something that makes her smile.

Things are an issue only if you make them so. Beyond that, there is patience, a nice natural resource to have.