I’ve been thinking about the nature of patience.

The other scribes, they rush. They always have. They fill their pages with blotted ink and their days with noise and constant chatter. Perhaps they’re afraid that if they stop, if the noise stops, so will they.

I have the opposite problem, but I can’t help but wonder how do they concentrate with all that bluster and bruit?

I sit at my desk, candle burning low, cat watching from the windowsill, and I wait. Not for inspiration – that word implies something fleeting, something that arrives and departs. I wait for clarity. It’s different. Clarity doesn’t arrive like a storm. It seeps in, like water through porous stone. Slowly. Quietly. Inevitably.

When I write, I write what I know. And only know what I’ve waited to understand, what I’ve learned, without any guesswork or pseudo-facts.

The others often ask me how I write so perfectly. I tell them: I write in the dark. They think I mean literal darkness. But I don’t.

I mean I write without ego. I write without the need to be seen or heard. I write because the words need to exist, because they need to be recorded and remembered, not because I need to be remembered for writing them.

Those scribes are more concerned about finishing their manuscripts rather than with being finished.

I’ve seen what eventually happens to them. I’ve smelled the burning parchment, heard the humming, and seen the exhaustion that results.

I don’t want that. So I write slowly. I write in the dark. And I wait.