The oracle in your private journal

If you do any private writing like I do, maybe you’ve shared my experience of finding a kind of oracle in your private journal, a bracing realization that this kind of writing can become a divinatory forecast of the themes and obsessions you’ll spend your life on. Pretty much everything I’ve ever been destined to write about first appeared in my private journal many years ago. Sometimes I stumble back across this fact.

Here’s an example that’s included in volume 2 of my collected journals, as shown in the accompanying page image:

If you really want to produce anything worthwhile, anything authentic and full of your soul’s life, you can’t allow yourself to think about your “life’s work,” the eventual outline of what you will have produced and accomplished when it comes time for you to die. You can, you must, only turn your attention to what’s here. What’s to do now? What is true or right for this moment, this work? The recognition of and reflection on the overall “meta” outline of your life is the business of others to attend to, or for you if you’re at that moment when you know your story is over. Aside from that moment, your proper focus, your proper business, resides in the present, in the now, inside this. You have no business trying to step outside and view this moment sub specie aeternitatis, as an entry in the eventually completed story of your life.

I wrote that in August 2003. Fast forward 22 years, and there I was, publishing Writing at the Wellspring just five months ago. And that book talks in depth about giving up the attempt to plan or plot your creative or life path into the future. Instead, “live into the dark” by realizing that your proper business is to focus exclusively on taking the next step before you in the present moment, devoting yourself to whatever your work is right now, and letting any larger pattern or meaning simply reveal itself spontaneously across time.

When I wrote that, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I first articulated this principle to myself in private more than two decades ago.

Which, come to think of it, effectively illustrates the principle itself.