FACING OBLIVION

Writers are like extreme sport athletes.  We are the sedentary mountain climbers, hang gliders, and BMX bikers.  While we may do it from the comfort and relative safety of our chairs, we share the danger enthusiasts’ desire for that brush with excitement and peril.  All for the coveted adrenaline rush associated with risk and pushing ourselves further than we’ve gone before.  Because it’s there.  The blank page or screen.  Daring us, seducing us, with promises of increased confidence, stamina, and determination.  That if we practice and train, and time it just so, and the gods look kindly upon us, there’s a good chance we’ll get on a roll and feel our blood throbbing in our ears as we chug along nicely.  We push on, always honing our skills and abilities in the hopes of attaining our goals.

 

As a mountain climber pauses at the summit to gaze down upon their starting point so far below, and the hang glider, now back on terra firma, shields their eyes to glance up to the sky where they’d just been soaring, and as the BMXer stands filthy, breathless, and sweaty at the finish line and looks back beyond the hills and hollows of the hazardous terrain they’ve just bested, writers, too stare at the formerly blank page or screen and think, “I did it.”  Accomplishment and success are such heady fuels that keep the extreme sport enthusiasts and writers going, sure that we will triumph, winners all in our quest for getting it right.