I’m back after not being able to post last time because I was traveling for work. This week’s question is a good one, but I’m in too somber of a mood to provide a coherent answer.
Recent events remind me, once again, that life is fragile. Two teenage girls struck and killed at a crosswalk in my hometown. An aunt dies of cancer. Good men, relatively young, fall asleep and don’t wake up. And I’ve been thinking that even with this evidence all around us, we hang on to tomorrow as if someone has written us a check for it.
Case in point. As a writer I hear from people all the time who want to write a book but can't start. This phenomenon, of having a story inside us that we never tell, has been studied, researched and discussed in many forms. An article by Madeleine Aggeler in The Guardian speculates why so many people want to write a book (October 2026). In The Guardian archives, articles about why women don’t write, how to write your novel this year, and how to get rid of writer’s block abound. A Medium article by C J Ahmed goes further by explaining the scientific reason of why we don’t write. (The Science Behind Why So Many People Don’t Write, June 2026).
I didn’t read deeply any of these articles because it’s always been quite clear to me that we are compelled to write because storytelling is innately human, and the biggest reason we may never lift a pen is fear. I have no further advice to offer, no wise words of wisdom to send fear packing beyond what has already been written. What I do have for those struggling writers is a wish.
My wish for you is that you think about how we were as children, how invincible we felt. We were so confident in our own abilities that we believed we could be football players, astronauts, firefighters, jet pilots, movie stars, doctors, and yes, writers. When we grew up to be teenagers, all the wild chances we took. We dove headfirst off a rock into a swollen river, smoked weed after dark on school grounds, and the exhilaration of running from and escaping the cops made us say, ‘hell, yes, we’d do it again’. We scorned tomorrows, laughed at the promise of one day. We ripped that check into a million pieces.
But something happened. We grew up. We learned to fear our dreams, especially if others told us they were impossible.
All of it reminds me of something Carol Burnett said on the IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson podcast. When Obama asked Burnett if she were scared to show up in New York with only a few dollars and a cardboard suitcase, Burnett replied, “No, I was too stupid”, going on to explain that she had been schooled by the Micky Rooney and Judy Garland movies where they would suddenly decide to ‘put on a show’. Next thing you know, Mickey and Judy are singing and dancing on an ornate stage in elaborate costumes that inexplicably appear out of cloud dust. Those movies made Burnett think she could do anything. She believed with the confidence of a child, and acted with the recklessness of a teenager. When she decided that she wanted to land a part in a Broadway play, she up and did it.
I’m not encouraging us to embrace stupidity or recklessness, but I hope that in the face of mortality we find ways to unlearn the fear that holds us back. We need to remember, as I heard my cousin say once, that the time is now, and tomorrow is not promised. And as Mary Oliver asks in the poem, The Summer Day, Tell me, what is it that you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? The emphasis on ‘one’ is mine.
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