I regularly come out of conversations with essay proposals for myself. Things that have been simmering in my background come together in the medium of interaction. Then I turn to the page and, without a live foil, the thoughts redissolve. What were all those things again? How were they connected? Were they just some obvious observations weakly strung together?
Clearly I'm relying on my partner as a tool for my expression. One part is that maintaining a concept of my partner's mental state, especially of their growing understanding of what I'm saying as I explain, helps wrangle thoughts into a structured list of words. Annother is that my empathy for their feeling the oomph of my ideas is part of my experiencing their significance surely and having the motivation to write them. It points to how I still have difficulty fully feeling my own self as strongly as I feel (my projection of) others.
On the one hand, I can't blame myself. My mindfulness practice and lifestyle changes have allowed my mind to relax into a state where I have vanishing inclination to hold any one thought as tightly or as long as is needed to make it to the page. It's a symptom of a greater change that has been for my good.
On the other hand, I do experience some attachment to these essay ideas and wish that they would experience a greater life than the ephemeral existence they had in that one conversation. It feels like a waste.
I write this having come out of exactly such a conversation. Maybe the ideas will yet find their expression. At least it got me back to the page, and so I decided to write about what I was instead presently experiencing.