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Carol Roh Spaulding's avatar

I'm glad you reposted this, Josh, as I had wanted to read it more carefully when it first appeared and didn't get back to it. Two things are true at once, for me: I don't believe in epiphanies as you describe them, and, at the same time, more and more, I have them all day long. The essence of the experience might be captured in the "looking away" because what's happening for me is that I am centering and allowing the insights to happen. Allowing is key. I am not making things happen, nor are things strictly speaking happening to me. It's more of a collaboration with presence. Quakers call this the process of discernment, which I am now inspired to write about on my soon-to-launch newsletter, Convinced (about my experiences of a member of the Religious Society of Friends).

Epiphanies feel like "aha" moments, but they also feel like the result of a process (often a very long one) that's simply hidden from my conscious mind. Call that God if you like, but I suspect God was simply waiting for me to get out of my own way. I'm working-working-working on a solution, but it is happening in the parts of my mind that I don't have control over (and it doesn't feel like work). The more I trust this process and the less I resist by trying to make something happen, the more easily an "epiphany" arises. Lately, I have been experimenting with just letting this discernment process happen all day long, when the stakes are much lower. Other religious practices call this continuous revelation. Then, somehow, it feels just as much an epiphany to realize what I want for lunch as it does to discern the solution to a short story whose ending has been eluding me.

In short, I, too, love the "aha" moments, especially when they feel like sudden bursts of insight. I think of the complex architecture of a short story, the elements I hope to include, the feelings I want my reader to experience, etc. There's so much I want to weave into a piece (and so much to cut, once I do!) But--with writing, as with the rest of life--I also believe that it was really only my resistance to all that the present moment has to offer that made the wait so long in the first place.

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Eleanor Anstruther's avatar

Yes, this, everyday I show up and sometimes I figure it out and sometimes no matter how quietly I sit, I don't see the way through, and on those days, when I'm done, I go for a walk and then it hits me.

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