Hi!
This weekend Anne and I went back to our alma mater, Wake Forest, to help her sister Mary move out of her dorm. I hadn’t thought too much about going back over the last few years, but turns out I really missed Wake. It was fun exploring all the pieces of our old lives, and having Mary show us everything that has changed. It also helps that the campus is gorgeous in spring, and that May produced many of my best memories there.
Partly as a lead up to this visit, I wrote an essay about the five year anniversary of our graduation. I had been working on it for a while – I found some typed out notes from the end of March – but I ended up writing most of it in one sitting, on Wednesday, with a lot of help from my friend Jake to organize my thoughts. It’s strange how hot and cold I can be as a writer – I’m curious whether externally imposed deadlines would make it easier to get things right on the first draft.
This week I read William Zinsser’s book, On Writing Well, which had been sold to me by the internet as the de facto bible for non-fiction writing. It lived up to the hype. My favorite piece of advice came early, on page six: “The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.” What a precise way to make a point about being precise! That line hung in my mind all week as I wrote.
Zinsser also made me feel better about writing about myself and my experiences. “Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person… Nevertheless, getting writers to use ‘I’ is seldom easy.” I know, I know – if you’ve seen my site, you’ll cry foul on this one – nothing in my writing reflects a person afraid to make himself the subject. And yet it’s very frightening. How big is my ego, I think, in order to make a personal website, write personal essays, and send out a personal newsletter? Pretty big, I guess, but hopefully I’m not alone: “Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”
I will finish with my feelings: I am so thankful tonight. I saw my dad for thirty minutes today, on the way back north, and given the context of everything happening in the country this weekend, I feel pretty damn lucky to be able to do that. I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: “Two men looked out from prison bars. One saw the mud, the other saw stars.” If I don’t make a conscious effort to be grateful, stars turn to mud very quickly.
One more quote for good measure, and a plug for a great podcast (below): “Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.” Tony Robbins
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
Five Years Since Wake – Five years? It’s been FIVE YEARS?
10 Unfounded Predictions for a Post-COVID World – Taking a page from the media’s playbook
What I’m Listening To:
Tony Robbins: On Achievement Versus Fulfillment – Tim Ferriss Podcast
What I’m Watching:
TED: Your body language may shape who you are – Amy Cuddy (MUST WATCH – thanks Matt)