I like to write, so I enroll in an 8-week writing class. On the first day, when it’s my turn to check in, I say, “I have no formal training in writing, never studied English beyond high school. I’ve taken adult education writing classes, groups and workshops, and read plenty of books on writing. But basically I don’t know what I’m doing. I also edit intuitively. I ask myself, “does my prose flow?” That’s it.

When I look at the syllabus of “Writing for Anyone,” I don’t see “going with the flow” as a weekly topic along with Characterization and Plot Development.  My stomach churns.

To start, the teacher asks, “in what point of view (POV, I learn it’s called) do you usually write?”

  I know how I usually write. I pour words onto the page until clarity comes, until I sense what in the world I am trying to say. Keep the pen moving: that’s my point of view.

              I clear my throat, volunteer to go first, throw my arm up high. I say oh-so-cleverly, “Do you remember that TV series, Columbo? Well, my POV is like Peter Falk’s character– stumbling, bumbling, mumbling. I just keep scribbling and tripping over clues, wondering what might come next. Then I see what happens. Just like in Columbo, something always does.” 

The other students stop taking notes, scrunch their foreheads and look up from their papers. Without moving their heads, they raise their eyebrows and roll their eyes above their eyeglasses to stare at me, funky grins pasted on their frozen faces. I hear an unspoken collective, “huh?”

Then Sam raises his hand and says, “I write with an omniscient narrator.”  

Kim says, “I like to write in third person up close.”

George goes last, “I prefer second person, but I know the Aristotelian Epistolary style uses it and that confuses me.”

I know I’m in trouble. I don’t know what Epistolary means and I see that Columbo is not a point of view. I become aware that I have joined this class with one of my familiar habits: I tend to dive into complexity beyond my level of simple understanding. My POV is “what the heck is going on?” 

Because I am often swimming over my head, I never feel as if I have jumped into safe waters. I shuddered when I shuffled into Level Five French class when I belonged in Level Four (I dropped out). I twitched when I decided to post some blogs and faced my dismal lack of technical and technological skills.  

When I don’t feel safe, my heart pounds in the center of my chest. I back off. Any chutzpah comes to a screeching halt; my usual charge-ahead momentum vanishes. Breath catches in my throat. I have made a big oops. I am a big oops.

Since Columbo, I have resolved to look into this feeling of walking wobbly when I shoe-horn myself into places bigger than my shoe size. One thing I’ve discovered already: even Michelangelo said near the end of this life, “Still, I learn.”

Phew.

I also found this by Albert Einstein: “A ship is always safe at the shore – but that is NOT what it is built for.”

Perhaps ships are built for Columbo moments.

These days, because I am practicing, I can sit with more a bit comfort in the midst of discomfort, feel somewhat more secure with insecurity. I am training myself in what Zen teachers call “being OK in don’t know mind.”

This is not easy.  Breezy Columbo was easy.  Yet I have come to see that as I want my prose to flow, so I want my life to flow, like a ship unleashed from the shore.  Flow. Can that be a point of view?

© Susan Lebel Young, MSEd, MSC, is a retired psychotherapist, teaches mindfulness, yoga and meditation and is the author of Lessons from a Golfer: A Daughter’s Story of Opening the Heart and Food Fix: Ancient Nourishment for Modern Hungers.  She can be reached at www.heartnourishment.com or sly313@aol.com.