If writing no longer helps me pay attention, maybe I’ll spend more time drawing things, like this “JOHN TO GO” I recently encountered on the Hob

A Writer Reflects on Turning 71

submited by

Style Pass

2024-06-24 12:00:09

If writing no longer helps me pay attention, maybe I’ll spend more time drawing things, like this “JOHN TO GO” I recently encountered on the Hoboken waterfront.

HOBOKEN, JUNE 24, 2024. Not to be morbid. But I just turned 71, and I can’t help but reflect on how old age will affect my writing.

So far, so good. I’ve never enjoyed writing more. My teaching gig pays the bills, so I no longer write for money, I write for fun. Writing is my way of paying attention to the world and talking back to it. If I have a spiritual path, it’s writing. Hence the brooding over aging’s effects.

Writing is, on the one hand, the ultimate exercise of conscious free will. I’m an old pro, I know what I’m doing. But I’m not entirely in control. Writing in some respects demonstrates what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “competence without comprehension.”

Almost everything I publish, whether column or book, begins with me sitting on a couch in the morning, pen in hand, blank page of a journal before me. On a good day, thoughts pop into my head, which I put into words. Or do words come before thoughts? I’m not sure.