Why I write: exploration and deceit

A wonderful quote from T.S. Eliot struck me during my morning Lectio 365 meditation this week.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets

These lines have stuck with me. I’ve been thinking over them this week and I’ve even added them to the About page on this site because of how they resonate with the why of this blog. In fact, they speak to the why of much of my writing.

Of suansita.com, I’ve stated,

Never a travel blog, this was for several years an expat blog. My writing is more about the traveller than the travel; it’s about the travelling my mind and soul have done, both abroad and at “home”.

The lines above from Eliot’s poem speak to this, this duality of coming and going in a physical or geographical sense as well as existentially.

I feel there is an explorer in me, at my core.

I love the exploration of travel and how it provides me with constant opportunities to look at the world, at reality, from an angle I hadn’t previously seen or considered.

I love the exploration of fiction and narrative non-fiction which likewise take me to places and viewpoints that are new (yet sometimes familiar!) to me.

I love the exploration of learning a new language for those same reasons.

When I was in Year 11, my school offered a class called Theory of Knowledge. It was basically an introduction to philosophy and it opened with Socrates’s adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This was the rationale for the course, for philosophy.

Eliot’s lines are similar, but better. Where Socrates says – rather negatively and pompously, I might add – that life is wasted unless you think about how you live, Eliot says everything we do in life is an effort to know ourselves and where we have come from.

Building on Eliot is Proverbs 14:8, which I read the following day:

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.

I rather like how the New Living Translation emphasises direction rather than behaviour in the first part, and clarifies that the deception of fools is self-deception:

The prudent understand where they are going, but fools deceive themselves. (emphasis mine)

I process things through writing the way many process through a conversation. Much of it involves dispelling my own “deception”: mistaken ideas of who I am in the world, what drives me, what my purpose is. In this sense, I write for myself and my own growth.

But if I was only writing for myself, I wouldn’t publish it here.

At some point I realised there was value in letting others read me. I’ve been encouraged to know that when people follow along with the exploring my mind and soul do, it can sometimes help them to compare and contrast their own journeys. At the very least, they feel seen in what they have experienced, less alone.

Yet even in writing, there continues to be for me a degree of deceit. Here are two examples of what I mean.

For the longest time, I have wanted to write a book. I always thought this would be a young adult fantasy but at times I’ve suspected that possibly what I actually wanted to write was a memoir. Except I hated the idea of writing a memoir because nothing that I’ve done or experienced in my relatively few years seems to warrant a memoir, and therefore writing a memoir seemed a self-indulgent thing to do.

This morning, a thought came unbidden: Maybe you don’t actually want to write a novel. Maybe you just like blogging and occasionally writing bad poetry. (This is like my inner self telling me I never outgrew LiveJournal).

It’s not a new thought – it visits me a couple of times a year. What was new was that I realised I don’t like worldbuilding (and I say I want to write fantasy?) and I like writing interiority, but only my own interiority.

A second example is that for almost a decade I have wrestled with wanting to be an influencer. By which I mean I don’t want to want it but suspect I secretly do. It looks so ridiculous to put it in writing, but I confess I have an ongoing debate with myself about whether I should try to build a following on LinkedIn or Instagram. My logic is that it would be good to have an established network and credibility if I ever wanted or needed to freelance.

But the reality is I don’t think I’d want to work for myself. I like work being separate from the rest of my life, but still meaningful and an expression of my values. I like going to an office and working with a team. I like not being in charge of everything.

So, that being the case, my hidden desire to rock socials is … what exactly? I hate LinkedIn broetry yet something in me is attracted to something in that. Maybe it’s the small but sneaky part of me that would rather be somebody than nobody.

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Writing is exploring and I’ll keep on exploring, to ultimately arrive where I started and know that place for the first time. Writing is examining where I am going while constantly discovering the ways in which I deceive myself.

I am an explorer and I am both halves of the proverb: the prudent and the foolish.