When you get wiser, had your years out on the proverbial road, the writing itself doesn't seem as important.  You're allowed to write because you exist in the Buddhaverse, a kind place full of light and joy and positivity.  

But the main thing is, the reality of Buddha, the benevolence that exists all around you.  This is the important thing, and it saves your psychology, and anyway you have to think this way or you'd be quickly in trouble and get caught in doing unproductive things.

The study and practice of Buddhism is more important than any writing, unless you are putting that writing into a partnership for the Noble Truths and so on.  These you must test yourself.

That's what I missed in my higher education, at Amherst College, the benevolence that must be there.  It's not to be had in increments, though a teacher must be criticial, but it must be given in the spirit of the great kindness of teaching.  (Robert Thurman was there, he would have done that for me, but I missed taking a class with him, which would have been right up my alley.)

A militaristic society, of course, does not want one to believe that people, human beings, come in an inherently gentle form.

I was even disillusioned in college.  Got okay grades, but after DeMott went away after my freshman year, or sophomore year, I was left to wander.  And with a few more hits and a few bad influences, I began to shut down, I suppose.  By my senior year I self-isolated, ruminating in my own thoughts, not being very social.  I was getting slower in writing papers, preoccupied, delving deeper and deeper into the mysterious meanings of Paradise Lost, of an early Hemingway story, The End of Something, it just started to take longer and longer.  Reading took longer.  

I ended up sticking to things that were not kindly to me.

The left hand knows not what the right is doing.  

And so, after a year moping around at home, after helping out my grandfather with recovery from cataract surgery, I was half shamed into going off to get a job.  My brother was going off to Washington, DC.  I took the train all the way down, with one bag, arriving on a hot humid night in late May... 

Eventually I found work at night running around as a busboy.  I got a series of office job through a temp agency, ended up taking a job with GWU Health Plan working as a clerk.  I took my lunch hour to quietly write, that's what I really wanted to do.

The restaurant business is full of benevolence and hospitality.  But sometimes the rigors of the work, laborious, physical, in your immediate area, can drag you down, a marathon you're entering into the final miles running on vapors.  It leads, of course, to the anesthesia of alcohol, a depressive, whose pain killing relief turns into poison the next day.

The body and the mind together is too marvelous an instrument to mess with so, but I got caught up in it, my own fault, my own lack of better judgement, pressures, friends of all stripes that validated it.  It paid the rent.

It beat me down, and I became lonely after the crowds went home and the faithful barman cleaned the bar at night and went home late, the town already asleep.  Getting home, a glass of wine to decompress turning into another, as it felt good, a change.

And I forgot the basic benevolence, the reality of all, even though I'd seen it so many times, my great fortune of the particular family I came into.  I had lost touch with a lot of things within.

(I wrote a book about some of this, the things that set it all off, more or less, my own princely fool life of unhappiness and wandering.)

Then the Covid came.  Along with my mother's inability to live on her own anymore, and she deserved the love and care and the company I'd deprived her of for far too long in my wandering struggles to deal with the restaurant work I'd fallen into...

And it became clear to me that I must bring out the knowledge of Dharma from within me, as it precludes no one.

My ignorance, my tacit dismissal, my judgment as but one more fanciful thing to keep afloat in my life while practicality bore down on me with a seeming vengeance, my nerves, all of it caused me to be hard on myself and other people, despite myself, my deeper Buddha nature, my caring for the world.

Odd that a job as a restaurant bartender would deny me the peace for such realizations, except when I wasn't working, time for a little self care and peaceful pursuits.

It's fine to tell your story, but otherwise it doesn't seem to me that writing is worth it.  An off shoot of your practice.

Ah, but I'm nothing but a goddamn drop out bum, beginning senior year in college.  Turned into a commited drinker.  Terrible.  So many days spent hungover.  Nothing worth writing about, because you didn't do anything.