Toward the middle of my stay on the Big Island, I attended a yoga class at Old Airport Beach in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. It was phenomenal. (Above, you can see the view I had from my mat). I almost didn’t go that morning, but somehow I did, and I managed to be in the right place at the right time. Heather, my yoga instructor, had a message waiting just for me.
It wasn’t just yoga that I almost skipped. I almost skipped the trip to Hawaii altogether. Before I left, I was full of doubt. I doubted my talent. I doubted my friends (more like, I doubted myself and that I could actually matter to anyone). I doubted that I could really open myself up enough to properly enjoy this experience.
Then, at the beginning of class, my instructor shared an excerpt from her reading from that morning:
"Entering a relationship before opening your heart is like jumping off of a building without wings."
My immediate thought was that I was not in a relationship. Then I realized I was in several relationships, including the one I’m in with writing. This message prompted me to think of all the ways I, a writer, close my heart—the ways many of us do—and how doing so makes it near impossible to thrive in this field. Like a wingless bird, we writers fall when we jump into new projects without opening our hearts first.
Writing is solitary work, but we don’t have to do it alone. We must open our hearts to love, to the journey of writing, and to the possibility of success.
open your heart to love
This is love in the most general sense. Love from family, from friends, from significant others, and from fans. Love for yourself, for what you do, and for what you know. It’s easy—almost second nature—to close your heart to love. To put up caution tape around it so that you don’t get burned. To wonder if you are worthy of loving and of being loved, and to fear discovering that you are not. But I’ve found that that fear can spill into my writing—that when I write from a place of unworthiness, I am limited. Being open to love can lift the mind out of that space.
open your heart to the journey
Journeys hardly ever go as planned. True journeys, at least. Something unexpected will always come up—surprises are inherent. That can be scary, but less so if we choose to embrace it. Open our hearts to being surprised, to being guided in new directions as gently, or as forcibly, as the ocean’s tide ebbs and flows. In writing, this happens when our characters take on lives of their own, when agents reject our work, when stories don’t pan out as well as we’d hoped. We can see these instances as parts of our journeys, rather than as ends, and adjust accordingly.
open your heart to success
On the surface, most of us want to succeed. Just below, some of us are afraid of doing just that. If I experience success once, is it just a fluke? Will someone pull back the curtain and reveal me to be a fraud? Or, maybe we think, If I succeed, how ever can I keep it up? Or maybe being successful just means having to admit that we’ve been cruel to ourselves. That all along, we were the ones holding ourselves back. Either way, the remedy is to acknowledge the reality that you can be the exact thing that you desire to be. Acknowledge, honor, and pursue it.
The yoga class ended with a reminder to express gratitude. I am grateful for my time in Hawaii, for the people I’ve met here, and for the love that surrounds me, just waiting to be taken in.
