What to Say when There Is Nothing to Say
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have days when you wake up in the morning with that feeling of dread: when I show up for work, I won’t have anything to say. It’s an awful feeling. The ground seems to fall away from under me and in its place arises . . . panic! My brain takes over, accelerating to hyper warp speed and zooming off in its familiar search mode, dashing hither and yon in the sheer desperation of finding something intelligent to say: something that makes some sense, that communicates something of importance; something that will astound my readers with my wisdom and the depth of my experience and compassion; something that will contribute in some significant way to the well-being of this troubled world and those with whom I share it; something, eventually, that will validate me and make me feel good about myself. The counterpoint, of course, is this: if I don’t have anything to say, I’m worse than useless. I’m a parasite. I’m a fraud. I know it’s pretty stupid thinking, really. But the feeling is a real one.
So what to do about it? I’ve found the first thing, always, should be to take a breath. One of the best-known and least successful human responses to panic is to stop breathing—as though that helps! So it’s important, I find, to sit quietly for a good few moments to restore a measure of serenity by the simple process of consciously observing the breath as it enters and leaves the body, allowing its rhythm gradually to replace the brain’s hectic activity with its peculiar, calming discipline.
Breathing out, breathing in . . . When you think of it, this in itself is nothing more or less than inspiration.
That done, I have several mental strategies I deploy to get back into the process of creation. Because that’s what it’s about: creative work is never about saying something. It’s about process. It’s a dance, an interaction with medium, no matter what your medium might be: words, paint, clay, song, or musical notes. The need to have something to say is no more than an impediment we set up when we’re too worried, too scared, too timid, or too mistrustful to risk letting it out and damning the consequences. (Fear, of course, is a great inhibitor. I wrote a book a while ago titled While I Am Not Afraid. The title was borrowed from the book’s epigraph, a wonderful text by the artist Duane Michals to accompany his photograph of a male nude: “Let me write this now, / This very moment, / While I am still foolish, / Before I become sensible again / And know better; / And while I am not afraid / To say things out loud.” A text, in my book, literally, to live by!)
My next step is to extend my attention to the breath into an actual meditation in which I purposefully try to nudge out all intruding thoughts and give the mind the simplest (and hardest) of all tasks: to focus exclusively on the breath itself. What happens when this tactic is successful is that the unconscious mind slips quietly into gear and keeps on driving while my brain is busy with its neutral concentration on the breath; when I open my eyes and return to the normal state of being, I find that the unconscious mind has completed a good part of the initial journey for me. I’m ready to go, and the words start to flow effortlessly.
Another tactic also requires some quiet reflection time: I sit and tell myself the story of yesterday. It’s not necessarily a narrative that comes up—although it might be. Very often, though, it’s a single moment, an event, a mini-epiphany that arises, perhaps one that I was simply unaware of as it occurred and disappeared unnoticed and unmemorialized into the past. It could be no more than a glance from a stranger in a crowd, the movement of a hand, the expression on a face. It could be the turn not taken, the adventure passed up in favor of the familiar route. It could be the glimmer of light on the surface of the ocean... Yesterday, for me, is always filled with moments rich in opportunity, in unprocessed, unrecorded matter—an abundant source of what to say.
As is, of course, the Now. Sometimes I have only to look around me. The images are there, the signs I need to follow: a photograph of my grandfather on the wall, the dog in a patch of sunlight on the carpet, the notepad on my desk with a couple of words scribbled out on it. Each moment is in itself a complex mother lode, replete with particular and inscrutable meaning, awaiting nothing but my pick and shovel to start mining it.
Just as fruitful as a resource for that first image, that first word, that first idea, is the daily newspaper. You don’t even have to be looking for news. There’s a surprising wealth of discrete images in the photographs, in the ads, in the texture of the words. Pages and pages crammed with stories, people, insights, problems, conflicts . . . We need not take them literally. The imagination, once it’s opened up and ready for adventure, can seize on anything and run with it. What happens all too frequently is that the search for something to say is precisely what shuts the imagination down, turns it off, or freezes it into inertia. In the meantime, opportunity is right there, staring us in the face from a common newspaper—not to mention the inexhaustible resource of books and images others have created in their search.
Finally, not least, there is the resource within dreams and fantasies. I myself am not actually very good at remembering dreams, though I do believe that we can train our minds to recall where they take us in our sleeping hours. Inevitably, though, when I do remember them, my dreams create a wonderful maze of paths to follow as I write them down. Again, I’m careful not to get too attached to trying to recall every detail with painstaking accuracy. Once I’m on the path, I tend to follow where the words and images lead me, rather than the strict narrative of the dream. Once I get into it, it’s the medium I trust to show me where I need to go.
Whatever strategy I choose to deploy, here’s the thing: it’s not only ludicrous for me to tell myself that I have nothing to say, it’s also a damn lie. The more honest truth is that it’s impossible not to have anything to say. As soon as I open my mouth, complete a gesture, perform an action, no matter how trivial it seems, I have created meaning. I have said something. My very inaction, my paralysis says something, as does my panic. So I take heart when that feeling surfaces. I remind myself that it’s always possible to step around these self-created barriers and venture forth, beyond them, into the unknown, which is where creation happens. And I try to remind myself, as I start out on that next adventure, that I’m much better off if I don’t have anything to say—if I don’t have the least idea what I’m looking for until I’ve found it.
