Happy Valentine's Day, fellow writers. If this day is about love, let us now love and cherish the "spirit" within us that makes us write. I have been thinking about what makes a writer a writer, and am looking forward to getting insights from Susan Colleen Browne tomorrow.
And now, through loving synchronicity, up pops a biographical article on Abraham Maslow on my IPad. I remember getting so excited in college as I read his theory of self actualization and hierarchy of needs. This must be where we should all strive for, I thought, on top of the hierarchy. If we were there, in that top golden triangle, we wouldn't have war, we wouldn't be consumed with dominating others, etc.
What does Maslow have to do with writing? This morning I read this excerpt from his 1954 collected papers, Motivation and Personality:
"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature. This need we may call self-actualization . . .(it) refers to man's desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become more actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything one is capable of becoming."
I realize now, after nearly 50 years, that the work that makes me feels self-actualized is writing. And self-actualization fuels the loving energy to do the work: the daily practices that feel like piano scales, the editing and editing, the intense observations using all senses, the great reading and not so great reading, the emotional dredging that feels like you are wielding your own scalpel.
So much to learn, so much to do, so little time.
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