Relational Value
I’m a writer and that means I love writing. It also means, if I’m happy, that I’m writing something I love and about which I feel passionately. It is this passion that drives me forward. It is that passion that flames the desire to continue until a novel is completed; it usually takes me about three months to finish a single draft of a novel. So, there has to be a lot of drive to keep an ADHD guy like myself on track.
And then something strange happened two days ago. I was riding my bike around and I came to a friends house. That friend was dying via a form of food poisoning. He couldn’t make himself throw up, he knew he was going to die. Straight out of James Bond’s Casino Royale, I mixed up a cup of water with A LOT of salt in it. Sure enough, within five minutes my friend had thrown up the poisoned food and we were on our way to the hospital to make sure nothing else had gone wrong.
I saved someone’s life the other day. A human being is alive who would otherwise be dead, if I had not intervened. Up until yesterday I’ve been thinking that my writing is the best thing I can do.
While I still love it and totally intend on continuing, right now, it just doesn’t have the same potency as it did four days ago. My writing is probably not going to save any lives. It could, but I doubt it. My wife called me a hero. I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know this: every time I see my friend, I’ll know that I’ve done something great and that the world is a slightly better place because of it.