Advice

I’m feeling so overwhelmed right now with new-girl-on-the-job anxiety coupled with annual-spring-onslaught-too-many-things-to-do panic that I thought, once again, about stopping this; this being my daily writing habit. 

Of course, I could let up a little on the compulsive housecleaning schedule. I could stop with the daily Wordle habit. I could stop scrolling Twitter. If I stopped doing all of those things then I’d have an extra hour every day. But then I’d live in squalor and my deductive reasoning skills would miss out on badly needed daily exercise, and I’d have missed the thread about Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to a bunch of high school students. 

Now I don’t have any way to verify the authenticity of the advice ascribed to Kurt Vonnegut in this possibly apocryphal letter to possibly fictional high school students. But it reads like something Kurt Vonnegut would write and so I’m going to suspend disbelief and embrace the lovely idea that Mr. Vonnegut replied to a group of high school students who wrote to famous authors seeking advice, and that he was the only author among the many to whom the students wrote to write back. 

Here was his advice: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.”

That’s good advice, isn’t it? I’m in the middle of writing three or four things and at least one of those things will never see the light of day but I’ll keep going on the other things in the five to fifteen minutes per day that I can spend tapping away on my Chromebook. Thanks for the advice, Kurt Vonnegut.