Certainty v. Clarity

and... Save The Date

Photo by Andres Molina on Unsplash

Elizabeth Strout, who is best known for her novel Olive Kitteridge, came to speak at my local bookstore. I bought my ticket quickly because she is a bigshot in the book world and the event, already moved to a larger venue, sold out fast. One thing that surprised me during her Q&A was how often she shrugged her shoulders and said “I don’t know”. It was very endearing and I loved her honesty and humility. She did not have all the answers—even about her very own book, her writing process and the characters she created from her own imagination.

As someone who suffers from anxiety, I crave certainty. I want to know THE answer—especially to the question, will everything be ok? But the older I get, the more I realize that we rarely have THE answer. We have probabilities, and ratios and “more than likelies”. Will the hurricane hit my house? Who knows? The weather map keeps changing. The wind moves, the moon pulls, and whatever other science-y things happen to change the equation. There are so many moving parts in this world, there is little to actually know for sure (despite Oprah’s promises). And Elizabeth Strout allowed that to be the case. She was comfortable in her uncertainty.

As I am learning to accept that certainty is rare, I am becoming more drawn to poetry. Poetry makes space for the not knowing and leaves things open to interpretations. Poetry provides a space where there is no wrong or right answer. It opens up possibilities to explore and discover and allows us to feel comfortable in the discomfort of not knowing for sure.

I was introduced to poetry when I took a Wild Writing® class several years ago with my teacher Anna Guest-Jelley. Poetry is the foundation of Wild Writing. We begin each class by listening to the teacher read a poem. Then we write extemporaneously (pen never leaving the page) for 10-15 minutes. Poetry is our kindling.

Wild writing is as mysterious as it is grounding. Every time we write, we don’t know what is going to happen. What will come up for us. What path we are going to take. What we will uncover. But in the end we figure stuff out. I don’t know how it happens, but it does. The alchemy of listening to the poetry and then writing is certain—and you know how much I love certainty.

Wild Writing has allowed me to better connect with myself and others. It has brought the beauty of words into my daily life and to feel deeply and live more authentically. There are so many unknowns in life and Wild Writing does not have all the answers. But I have found that the practice leads to more clarity and that is something.

Good News!

I have almost completed my Wild Writing Teacher Training under the instruction of its founder Laurie Wagner and I cannot wait to share what I have learned. Please SAVE THE DATE for a free trial class to get a sense of how Wild Writing works. Experience the magic yourself!

Save The Date

WILD WRITING TRIAL CLASS (FREE)

Wednesday, July 15th at 6:30 pm EST

A Zoom link will be provided

More info to come!

Interested? Email me at amyalpertlifecoach@gmail.com or simply reply to this email.

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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life.