Bottled Lightning

 I don't write as well as I used to back when I was a lot younger. Nor am I as creative. The cogs of my brain seem to have slowed down to a pedestrian crawl as I became older, as I started to focus more and more on the morose business of living life as an adult shackled with real responsibilities. I don't know how the actually creative individuals do it, but I imagine for the rest of us, that's how it is as time marches on.

    But once in a while, you get that brief flash of inspiration. Suddenly, the storm clouds in your mind clear, and there's a patch of the former brilliance shining down on you. It's moments like these, when that elusive flash of bottled inspiration makes its presence felt, when it suddenly feels great again to be a writer. Suddenly, writing isn't just a chore anymore! Once again, you are staring at the eyes of god and feeding off that energy, that residual genius, and the words are suddenly flowing from your fingers like the apostles given the power to speak in tongues.

    That's a great feeling. And it is terrible.

    Allow me to paint you this picture. Here's you, a young writer, gifted with a quick wit, youthful vigour, and all the time in the world to sit down and transfer your mind onto paper without issue. You are brilliant, you tell yourself, and you will create the next great novel of your community. 

    As you get older, the vim, the vigour, and the time all start to fade away. The vim and vigour probably not as much as the time, but from the bottomless font it used to be, suddenly you find yourself scraping the bottom of the barrel filled with what was once your energy. It isn't quite empty, but you can see that you're slowly running out. So you start using it sparingly. After all, there's so much to do, more than can ever be done, as Elton John once so brilliantly put it.

    You sit back one night, sipping a beverage of your choice, thinking back to yourself  where did all that brilliance go? Suddenly you feel old, and not in the same way you thought being old was going to be like when you were much younger. The razor's edge that is your time and your responsibilities is making getting older harder, more tedious, gasp turning it into an actual chore. 

    Weren't you going to write the next great novel? Weren't you going to become a writer much celebrated by your peers, derided by your foes, and a name lurking in the back of every Juan de la Cruz of your generation and the next five to ten generations?

    This is where the briefest flashes of brilliance starts to seem like a terrible thing, when compared to a less brilliant writing career, fueled by a steady stream of lukewarm creativity that could maybe move somebody to tears or laughter, but wouldn't exactly change history. 

    This is where you realize that settling for being able to make just one person in the crowd appreciate your story is enough, and that you don't actually need to change the world, because the world will keep on turning with or without you. 

    This is where you decide that leaving a legacy isn't as important as being able to do what you love doing, if it means you still have time for everything else that's important. And that not everything needs to be done in a day.