“The worst that can be said about a man is that he did not pay attention.”
— William Meredith
I haven’t written here in a while. Not because I’ve stopped writing altogether. Far from it. I’ve been writing more than ever. But I’ve been writing privately — working on a project that I’m keeping close to the chest for now. And while I’ve found myself with so much to share with the world, I’ve been hitting a wall when it comes to writing publicly. I started writing three different essays before abandoning them halfway through. Everything I wrote felt dishonest, like I was writing from my head and not my heart.
My last essay was in April. Since then, so much has changed. The leaves on the big Sycamore outside my window finally returned. Storms have come and gone, leaving behind a trail of debris and inspiring a bright green vitality in our otherwise gray and cemented neighborhood. I’ve always liked the way flowers grow here, wild and untameable between cracks in the pavement, exploding out of abandoned lots, crawling up the sides of old houses. That’s Houston: Colors hide in an abbreviated winter, only to explode out of the Earth with pent-up vigor after the first Spring rain.
I wrote The Hour Between Dog and Wolf while listening to the sound of one of those early spring rains. I remember sitting on the terrace of a cafe with my sweater on, trying to contain my shivers in the cool wet air. The weather has since changed. The moon has circled the Earth three times, shrinking and expanding through its phases. The midday sun is no longer as friendly as it once was. The rain still falls, only much warmer now.
Outside of me, things began to move slowly over the last several months. Everything flowed lethargically under the weight of an oppressive heat. But in my mind, things picked up the pace. I got busier. Work piled up. Responsibilities crept into my solitude, stealing me away from myself. The chores, the deadlines, the assignments, the dog, the dinner, the this, the that, the last, the next. My thoughts began to bleed into each other. The winter clarity disappeared, replaced by an overflow of thinking. Days flew by as distorted, blurry visions — unclear shapes through a foggy window. And I started to feel trepid, as if I were walking toward the edge of a cliff in the dark.
I have been a slave to my own thoughts before. For years, I was trapped on a train screeching downhill. My mind was in a constant state of fight or flight. Everything was done in fear. Everything was done in a rush. I thought I would never recover. But that was the old me. I’ve since learned to live slowly — to write my way off the train.
Somehow, I made it, but each time I go through one of these semi-stressful periods, a voice inside my head begins to freak out. I start to fear that I will fall back into old ways, that I will be forced back onto the train and lose control.
The last few weeks have been lived in a semi-frantic state. When it came time to write, my inner critic would start yelling at me. “You’ve lost your touch,” it would say. “You’ll never be able to write anything meaningful ever again. You’re a fool for thinking you could ever write in the first place. You’re a big, dumb fraud.” Ah, Resistance, my old friend. I tried to ignore it, but that voice only became more emboldened the more panicked I became.
I really did start to fear the worst. Here we go again, I thought. Preparing myself for the inevitable downhill spiral. I’ll never find clarity again. I accepted it. Maybe I can’t fix this. But then, just as I had almost given up hope, a ghost spoke to me.
Things began to get really bad when I noticed I was defaulting to distraction again. I was picking up my phone, turning on the TV, watching videos, or listening to podcasts to get my mind off the treadmill. But I’m wise enough to know that those solutions are only temporary, and they only exacerbate the issue. So, I decided to go for a walk, without the dog, without headphones, without distraction.
I met the ghost after about a mile. The sun had just set and the sky was turning into a gradient of cotton-candy pinks and pale oranges. A breeze was rustling the leaves around me and I found myself walking directly toward a big Crape Myrtle at the corner of the street. It was nestled just before a stop sign, in a quiet neighborhood of new white houses with shiny windows that reflected the orange parts of the sky.
I was listening to the sound of leaves and distant birds in the rare dinner-time silence. Then I heard a voice, as clearly as if someone had been standing right beside me. “Just pay attention,” it said. I looked around to see if someone had been standing there with me. But there was no one. The voice was coming from the tree. “Just pay attention,” it repeated. I couldn’t help but smile. The ghost in the tree spoke again: “Pay attention.”
“I hear you,” I said.
The phrase echoed in my head for the rest of the walk. Just pay attention. Just pay attention. Attention. Slow down. Pay attention.
Of course, nothing changed immediately. Telling an anxious mind to pay attention sometimes feels like telling an angry person to relax. That’ll do it…
But I had never heard a voice like that, an untraceable voice that did not come from a human mouth. It was as if someone had spoken the words and they had wandered aimlessly through the streets, waiting for my ears. Call it a ghost, or call it God, or call it my intuition, either way, that voice was loud and clear. And it shook me out of my delusion. I will be fine, I thought.
Over the next few days, I started diving back into books. I mean, I usually read every night, but now I focussed even more on absorbing the words. I read each page slowly, going back and rereading chapters, living in the literature as patiently as I could. In the mornings, I wrote and sometimes read poetry. More literature, more poetry, less internet, less bullshit. I began to pay attention to the world around me — reacquainting myself with my senses. The lingering smell after a heavy rain. The bitter taste of black coffee. The warmth of sunlight on my bare shoulders. The intricacies of my wife’s light brown pupils. Thoughts came one by one, and I chose what to examine and what to disregard. I remembered the words of Julia Cameron: “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to our capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”
Now, I’m slowly gaining back my old clarity. Slowly but surely, the strings I had tied so tightly around my heart are beginning to unravel and I am opening up. I’m finally talking to ghosts again. They’re guiding me, reassuring me that I will, in fact, be able to write. That I will be myself again.
What a relief. There’s so much I want to say. There’s a lot to process in three full revolutions of the moon around the earth: plenty of joys, a tragedy, several comedies, new ideas, new chapters in my life. I want to write about it all. But for now, I’m just going to pay attention. The ghosts are speaking again.
Needed this today, thank you.
This one hit home.