I am not the first writing teacher to see the relationship between the personal and spiritual journey and the journey of the writer. Natalie Goldberg and Gail Sher have both pointed out the similarity. The Zen sayings “how you do anything is how you do everything” and “wherever you go, there you are” have become almost commonplace, to the point that we might not really hear them any more. The point is that writing will bring up all our issues: self-doubt, concerns about criticism and humiliation, and so on. All our closets will be emptied out for inspection, and not just for ourselves to inspect, but for every agent, editor, and reader to judge. No wonder we are afraid to write.

The spiritual (read: writing) journey is like “getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands” writes Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart.  “Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.” We are inspired and exhilarated along the journey, but we also encounter fear.

Fear alerts us to the reality of change and the fact that we don’t know what will happen next. Our first reaction to fear is to run from its stimulus. If we’re honest, however, we understand that the safety of our small boat is an illusion. We have our health, job, IRA, car, house, friends, and family as our boat, but a natural disaster, act of war, accident, or illness reveals how illusory safety is. When we feel threatened, we have the opportunity to realize the deep truth of our precariousness.

Instead of running away from fear, we can choose to sit with it, to metaphorically invite the demon of fear to tea and open our heart to its teachings. “When we stop there,” Chodron says, “and don’t act out, don’t repress, don’t blame it on anyone else, and also don’t blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.”

A former teacher told me of the day she realized she didn’t want to get out of the car at school, although once inside, she enjoyed teaching. Sitting with her fear, she understood that she was afraid of growing old and dying without having explored the full richness of her creative talents and abilities.  Befriending her fear allowed her to follow her heart and choose a different life.

People mutter, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” and go about their business unaware they have spoken a deep inalienable truth. When we accept at a deep level the inevitability of change and the fact that we don’t know, life takes on immediacy. Some dying persons share that the gift of their illness is a realization of the preciousness of life. They describe how color, sound, touch, become vivid and clear, and their hearts open to beauty and compassion.  To find their heart, they had to be willing to be nailed by fear.

We don’t need to have a life-threatening disease to have this experience. We can choose to meet fear daily—in the newspaper headlines, our child’s report card, our tax statement—and, instead of distracting ourselves, stay on the edge. Teetering on the brink of annihilation is where we find compassion for ourselves and the human predicament.

Whenever we avoid our writing, we are dancing with fear. We may call it “no time” or “no money,” but really we’re facing the fear of not knowing if we are good enough, if anyone will like it, if we can finish, if we can start. On the other hand, creativity only exists in not knowing—we have to embark in that very small boat across that vast ocean alone without a map. That’s what writing is. We start with the heart of what matters to us and take the pen and start rowing out to sea. And what we discover is always vaster and more exotic than what we could have imagined.

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