UNINSPIRED

‘When most of the things you do are not inspired, then you must be dead‘

 ~Mulyale Mutisya

Lately, I have not been inspired to write. It has precisely been a month since I have written anything outside of a paragraph, and post-worthy for my blog. I would be abolished from the writers’ association when they come to learn that all I have been writing are one line long text messages. Many proficient writers would say that the art (or is it craft?) of writing is best articulated and ameliorated when you jot down something everyday. Anything. Woe to me then!

I do not consider myself a writer not because of my failure to adhere to the afore mentioned. I write, yes. But do I consider myself a writer? No. I have made money (Ok, let’s say pocket-money) out of it- and I still am, but I see it not because I am a writer, rather out of the sense that I have to do what ought to be done, in the business sense. On the other hand, I blog not because I earn a shilling (actually this is the most unprofitable thing I do pocket-wise, but the most profitable otherwise), or that I am a writer but it’s simply because I write.

It’s easy to write to earn money, because bills become your inspiration. My blogging which offers no monetary reward (and I don’t expect it to) is my brain materializing on digital paper. Every single article written is birthed out of an inspiration of some sort. But recently, I have not been inspired to write. At all. And this post is not in anyway a product of inspiration but a presentation of a fact. Pressures have been placed on bloggers to ‘be consistent‘, ‘don’t keep your readers waiting long‘, and ‘things happen everyday, where is your power of observation?‘ In this regard, I don’t even qualify to be a blogger. This is not a renouncement of my site but my stray thoughts penned down, not out of inspiration so to add.

Does my lack of inspiration bother me? To the core. I miss sharing an experience or a thought with my circle of readers. At the same time, my lack of inspiration sits well with me to some degree. I would rather not write than dupe my readers, and myself about things that do not inspire me in any way. My creative writing teacher back in undergrad would probably pick up a case of writer’s block, which I would disagree as I have a series of interesting topics but none inspired enough to write about- only to think of. A psychologist would diagnose that something within me is missing hence my lack of inspiration. Ironically, when something lacks in or out of me, I tend to write all the more. The writing fraternity would recommend that I ‘get out there‘ and experience something new and thereafter my inspiration would return like a power surge. I have been out of town and experienced the novelty, and still nothing has inspired me to write. At this point, I doubt climbing The Himalayas would offer any inspiration or even coming out of the Mariana Trench alive.

With all these solutions seeming unresponsive, grabbing a book should have done it. I have read great books in the past month, but nothing. One of them, Who will Cry When You Die had me for some reason saying the title in reverse, ‘Who Will Die When You Cry‘ and thought the author would have used it instead. Another book I came across, America’s Mistress: The Life and Times of Eartha Kitt but didn’t get around to finish it partly because I was transfixed by the epilogue which described Eartha, the character on whom the book is based on, as having an odd, angular face, and I kept jumping to the pictorial segment of the book just to see what an angular face looks like. So far, I have only had inspirations to come up with sloppy headlines and revise my geometry, nothing to write.

I even have attended meetings and brainstorm sessions with writers, some accomplished and award winning whereby ‘ideagasms’ should have popped up and my creative juices extracted, but not even a drop of inspiration was found in me. I guess a lot can happen around you and not within you. Again, this is not in any way an inspiration but an observation. Sometimes, we get uninspired and who are we to force inspiration when there is none? I have come to effortlessly relax in my state of inertia. Sometimes it is okay not to do anything, for a while. Just sit and muse. And as I muse, I have a strong feeling that my tooth wants to tell a tale. Is that an inspiration for a post or is it a faux to acquaint myself with odontology? We shall see.