Leaving Umbria

I've been living next to a castle in Umbria for a month, but now my time here is drawing to a close. For the most part it's been a wonderful remove from daily life, though thanks to the Internet, I haven't found it possible to be totally removed.

Aside from a few pounds, I've gained the chance to take a deep breath and hit the "reset" button in my life. As a writer, I find that sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of editing words or sentences, or the latest ups and downs that are the inevitable condition of an artistic career.

So what's it all about? What's it really all about? Here's my latest guess.

When I was a kid, I used to go down to the basement and act out stories, performed by my stuffed animals. Today, I do the same thing, though generally without the stuffed animals. As a kid, I didn't worry about whether I'd sell my stories, whether they'd be favorably reviewed, or in what quantities they'd be sold. These are the illusions that come with adulthood, because you feel that as an adult, you don't have the right to play. In fact, you do have a right to play, just not the right to expect that anyone else cares.

And so as I move forward with my writing, the one thing I want to focus on is preserving as much as possible that sense of play. We play not only because it amuses us but also because it defines us, shapes our experience, transforms life's inexplicability and randomness into bite-sized morsels of order and beauty.

We know all this without having it taught to us when we're kids. Now as adults, we have to learn it all over again.