For Its Own Sake

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity. Every role is a fictitious sense of self, and through it everything becomes personalized and thus corrupted and distorted by the mind-made "little me" and whatever role it happens to be playing.

Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth
page 107

I had an Aha! moment when I read this. I realized that most of my best writing had happened when I had slipped out of self-consciousness and into a zone where my awareness had zeroed in on the project and I was no longer projecting either hopes or fears onto it--success or failure became irrelevant as engagement in the process became enough.

But these moments have always come over me spontaneously. I was referring to them in my Monday Poetry Train post of two weeks ago:

The [poems] I've written just sorta happened to me like waking up or blushing. Now I'm hoping to see if I can learn to make poems happen on purpose like making the bed or brushing my teeth.

My aha moment was realizing that learning to make poems (or stories) happen on purpose meant learning to 'wake up' into that zone of unselfconsciousness on purpose in order to engage in the process for its own sake.