Jeremy C Kester

It took me two weeks to start writing a poem. There it was, sitting in my brain taking up valuable space. I wasn’t writing it down. Even having notebooks and cell phones available when there wasn’t a computer even, I, for some reason, chose to hold onto it. Kept it hovering in my thoughts as though there was more to do with it. I should have just written it down.

I finally did so the other day.

One thing I noticed after was that it was gone. Out of my mind. Once I entombed it onto paper, I didn’t think of it again. It was almost like I spent a few minutes cleaning up this one corner of a room that I needed to use.

Today my mind was able to move forward with other things. Taking the lessons from finally writing that last little piece of a poem, I wrote them down right away. Amazing how much that helped.

Decluttering a brain is very important. I am learning that. Letting ideas, phrases, etc stagnate only clogs up the gears. Even allowing a single poetic line hover in the ethos of my mind kept other words at bay. They become glue, binding up the creative process.

Without understanding what I was going on, other times where I had written out story ideas helped in very similar ways, allowing to push the idea out of the way so that I could continue with other things. Whereas in many cases whereas I didn’t want to lose an idea so I held onto it, writing them down allowed me to do just that, but properly shelve them for later.

It’s about not letting things linger. Not getting stuck. Not pushing things off and getting them out of the way. Keeping that clutter hasn’t helped me. It makes sense why it hasn’t. Like food being left out… rotting. So I am working at clearing out my brain, getting all of these rotting, festering thoughts down, out before I, myself become stagnant, unable to make progress any longer.