The Writing Space

Recently I joined a club hosted by a coworker for writing because Jinu told me about it and I found it interesting. Every Thursday we just get together to write and this English teacher would give us prompts for us to work on. Today was my first time going there. 

So here’s the prompt:

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet:

“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

And then we were asked to provide some random questions from or not from the prompt and then they collected the questions. We then each drew a question from the box and we could decide whether to use it or not for our writing. Then we had 20 minutes to write.

So here the question I got: who do I want my children to be?

I decided to go with the question and here’s my writing:

I don’t know. I guess the question I need to first answer is “who do I want my inner child to be?”

Everyone has an inner child living inside of them. Some inner children are louder so that we are aware of them, while some are quieter, hiding in the corner so that we have forgotten about them, or if we acknowledge their presence our current reality could be destabilized. Maybe they are too scared to make a noise, because at one point in our life, we were penalized for being too loud; maybe they are genuinely curious about the world so that they prefer to be quietly observing their surroundings before they decide to speak up.

That inner child is powerful. Despite being fragile, they connect to this world instinctively, without much education or verbalization. They know very well how they feel and they have no fear in expressing them, until the world starts to tame them. Sometimes that child was tamed too early so that they did not have the time or opportunity to ask real important questions about the world. Those questions became unsolved to them but they still sit somewhere when they become adults. Sometimes it feels like we have spent a lifetime trying to figure out the answers to some questions that we don’t even know how to ask precisely. For example, when we ask, “Who do I want my children to be?” What exactly is being? Does it happen in the present moment or does it happen in the future? Is it “who” or is it “what”? Do we define “who” by someone’s actions by their values, their beliefs, or identity markers? If I say “I just want my children to be happy and healthy,” do happiness and health make who they are?

A deeper question I sense here is “what is actually the purpose we’re looking for in our own life, not necessarily in our children’s life?” Many parents have filled their 24 hours a day with endless activities that they believe will contribute to their children’s growth, without really knowing what they themselves are really pursuing in their life. Those activities, supported by data, psychological and medical research, could contribute to their children’s growth, but only on an aggregate level. What if a child, or any human being is unique, one-and-only in this world that what they truly wish for is to be felt, understood, and held before the world tells them to go quiet and be like everyone else, or to fit into some labels and adjectives? Then the answer is for them to just live with all their senses, and perhaps one day they will live to find out the answers.

*****

When I shared my writing with the group, everyone was silent for like 5 seconds, and then the host said, “Kendra that’s really powerful.” I said “thank you.”

Then Angel was interested in the club and my writing so I showed him my writing. All he could say was, “this was really good. With only 20 minutes? How many people there were non-native speakers?” Then he made a comment that my writing would challenge a lot of my coworkers’ parenting, and then he started talking about his coworkers struggling with the education system.

I just couldn’t feel any resonance from Angel’s comments. If anyone is reading my stuff, I’d want them to resonate with my points about the “inner child”, the suppressed voice, etc, but obviously Angel has zero clue about those things. I wonder if anyone else in the club understood what I said except for Jinu, because he was nodding the whole time when I was reading my writing out loud.