Fantasy vs. Commitment – and Why You Need Both

Greetings and welcome to the fall! The Writing a Sacred Path blog will now post every second and third Tuesday of each month. Here is my post for this early fall day.

I have always envied hikers. Real hikers, I mean. The poet I know who treks into the desert to write. The friend who camps in the mountains alone.  The colleague who hiked the John Muir Trail this summer. I can enjoy a nice walk in the woods, but the women I envy are ones who can don heavy loads and head into the wild for days at a time.

So why don’t I do it, then? What is stopping me? If I wanted, I could start building up my strength today. I could do more cardio. Hire a trainer. Take classes on backpacking.

I could do these things, but I’m not going to. Why? Because, while I enjoy dreaming of the solitude and stunning vistas hikers enjoy, I don’t want to deal with the blisters, sunburns, bug bites, sweat, dirt, exhaustion, or peeing behind a tree. I like the idea of hiking into the wilderness, but I don’t want to do the actual hiking. This is the difference between fantasy and commitment.

Fantasizing is a wonderful thing. It lets us imagine thrilling experiences without the difficulties that come with them. We all do it. Most girls who dream of becoming ballerinas, think of twirling in the spotlight for an adoring audience, not of the aching muscles and bleeding feet. Even grownups fantasize about becoming astronauts or Olympic skiers, except without the years of training and physical danger. I recently talked to someone who said she’d love to be a wildlife photographer, if it didn’t mean spending months in miserable conditions to get that perfect shot.

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Being a writer is like this, too. I have known dozens of people who want to be writers but without the actual writing. They imagine their books on the shelves of Barnes and Noble and picture people lining up at a book signings, but they frankly admit that they don’t want to get up every morning and sit down to write. They won’t spend long hours pounding out words. They can’t face the rejection, the lack of remuneration, or the years alone in a room as Michael Ventura puts it. When the going gets tough—and when you’re a writer the going is almost always tough—they do something else.

If I sound snide about those people, I don’t mean to. They are no different from me with my dream of hiking.

Gretchen Ruben has listed “being Gretchen” as one of her 12 commandments of happiness. That means, “to let go of all the things that I am not — to acknowledge what I don’t encompass.”

Being yourself means knowing the difference between fantasy and commitment. It means figuring out what you only want to dream about and what you’re willing to work for.  It means accepting your fantasies for what they are and embracing your commitments with your whole heart. For me, it means sighing with admiration as my outdoorsy friends talk of their adventures, while happily acknowledging that that I’m not one of them.

If you are not a writer at heart, there’s no use forcing it. If you are a writer—and chances are everyone reading this post is—you will know it for one reason. Not because your novel gets published or your poetry wins awards. Not because you are brilliant and talented. Not because you have an agent or a hundred stories in print. You will know it because you don’t just imagine how cool being a writer is, you write even when it isn’t cool at all. You do the work. You get the the words down.

You have more than the fantasy. You have the commitment.

Jill Jepson is the author of Writing as a Sacred Path. Her ebooklet, Calling Up the Writer Within: Writing at 50 & Beyond is available free here.