I’m writing a lot for my work just now. Ten minutes ago, I finished the last vital essay for my clients and had a look at my word count for the day. The astonishing figure stared up at me: three thousand, four hundred and sixty-six words.
This is a ridiculous amount. If I were talking to one of my own writing clients, I’d gently suggest that they don’t need to do that much. They might break their brain, I’d add, making a little joke.
But these thoughts do need to be written. They are my job. There’s no getting away from them.
My brain is telling me, right now, that it is a bit broken. It’s been thinking for hours, stretching for useful ideas, attempting to express those ideas with clarity and purpose. It’s been going at full blast, and it wants to stop.
It does ache, a little. It is tired. But it’s not busted. That’s a story I tell myself. Somewhere, deep in my mind, there is the tale that There Are Only So Many Words. Once I’ve hit the word limit, there are no more.
That’s not quite true. It’s a kind of zero sum thinking. One of my favourite questions is: ‘What’s the reality?’ The reality is that there has been effort. There has been work. I have thrown everything I have into it. I’ll need a little rest and restoration before I embark on the Zooms which will take me up to 9pm.
But I’m not finished. I can take a breath and type slowly and find a few more words, even if I have to rummage about in the bottom of my basket. I can believe in infinity, and beyond.
I’ve missed a few Cup of Coffee days because of this not-quite-true story. When I finish my work writing and start thinking of you, the No More Words story tells its cross tale. That then gets caught up in another not-quite-true story. This one says that I’ve used up all the good stuff and I’ll only have the dull and the second-rate and the pointless left for you. I can’t give you dregs.
There’s a fine line here. That story is not quite true, but it has a seed of truth in it. I do have a sacred compact with the Dear Reader. You give me your precious time; it’s my job to give you the best I can come up with. But here’s an interesting question. What do I even mean by best? The Perfection Demons tell me that the prose must dance, that the words should shimmer with clarity, that the ideas must leap onto centre stage and preen in the spotlight.
Is that really, in this context, The Best? Is that the only place where the value lies? I’m still not entirely sure what this Coffee exercise is for, but I do know that I want to connect with other human hearts and human minds. And perhaps one of the best ways of doing that is to pitch up in humanity and honesty and say, ‘I don’t have much left today. And there will be days when you don’t have much left. But all of us - me, you and Barney McGrew - can find one more thing, one more word, one more small, imperfect effort.
I have a fatal attraction to the idea of fabulousness. I do want to come here and to give you all the glitter and all the dazzle. I’d love to make you laugh and make you catch your breath and make you feel a little bit better about the world. (Which, just now, does seem very mad and sad indeed.) But that’s my dream day. That’s when all the stars are aligned. And none of us can rely on those days coming in an endless, stellar stream.
There are the dour days and the dreich days; the tired days and the scratchy days; the complicated days and the completely rubbish days. That granite reality is, in the end, what links us together, in our humanness. And the most beautiful human thing we can do then is simply to show up, and put one foot in front of the other, and remember that we can’t always be dancing. Sometimes we are trudging, and stomping, and dragging our feet. But we are still moving, somewhere; we are still making minuscule progress along the rutted path; we are still alive and actual and here.