Born of Desire and Delight

“Discipline is born of desire and delight.”

I copied that statement a while back without noting where it came from. Probably from one of the dharma talks I listen to while I do my morning Pilates/yoga. But whoever said it first, those words strike me as utterly and profoundly true.

“You are so disciplined!” People have said that to me all my writing life. And I have often demurred. After all, isn’t discipline doing faithfully something you don’t really want to do? “When I exercise,” I’ve said, “I’m disciplined. When I clean my house, I’m disciplined. Writing is simply what I get up in the morning to do.”

And yet if discipline is born of desire and delight then that’s exactly what I am . . . disciplined. And most other working writers are, too. Not because we beat ourselves into performing. Not even because we stand sternly over ourselves to make sure we meet our obligations. We are disciplined because the desire to write—the need to write—is what we are made of. Writing lies at the center of our lives. To stop writing would be like stopping breathing.

Yet I encounter many people who “want to write” and don’t have the discipline to actually do it, either in the “desire and delight” sense or in the old nose-to-the-grindstone one. In fact, wanting to write can be the exact opposite of doing it. I suspect what some folks really want is to have written . . . a whole different phenomenon. They don’t desire and take delight in the process of putting words down, one after another, of thinking through and shaping a piece, of writing and revising and revising again. They desire—and would take delight in if they only had it—the end result, that is the moment when they might hold the finished manuscript in their hands. Even better, they desire the moment when the world holds the resulting book . . . and praises it, of course.

For many years, I, too, “wanted to write.” The act of gathering words on paper was, at best, a guilty hobby. I wasn’t “disciplined” about my writing then in the sense of being structured or consistent. It was something I fled to in the cracks between more necessary activities: teaching, grading papers, having babies, caring for them, preparing meals or cleaning the house. (When I could escape from anything, it was usually the cleaning. In my world, cleaning can usually wait.) But even then I was disciplined in the sense represented by my opening quote. Writing remained my desire and delight.

Eventually I was able to leave my teaching job, the kids grew old enough for school, and I struck a bargain with my then husband to be given the freedom to devote myself to writing instead of taking on work that would guarantee the paycheck our family needed. And that’s when my friends began to see me as “disciplined.” I got up every morning to write.

But I did it, not because I suddenly grew a serious new muscle called “discipline.” I did it because I was, at last, free to use my life in the way that served my deepest desire, that gave me delight, every time I sat down to work.

That desire, that delight is the foundation for the 10,000 hours of practice we often hear spoken of, the 10,000 hours that turn an amateur into a professional.

So . . . yes, it’s true. I’m disciplined. I live in desire and delight.

And I can’t imagine a better or more privileged life than the one lived that way.