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There are two ways to live life. One is to live as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is to live as though everything is a miracle. - Albert Einstein
I love that phrase. Write drunk, revise sober. Now, before I get accused for promoting drunkenness and all that, let me clarify what I mean. As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, “Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Ephsians 5:18, NLT).
What, then, do I mean by supporting this statement?
Simple. We associate the loss of inhibitions with drunkenness. Granted, usually it’s a good inhibition that is lost – the inhibition to do stupid things like pee in the streets or something. But the loss of inhibitions in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing.
And so it should be with life. Too often we inhibit ourselves unnecessarily. Too often we are unable to act, unable to make progress on the plans and designs that we have for our lives. Too often we allow fear – fear of appearing ignorant, fear of being vulnerable, fear of failure or disappointment – paralyze us.
The problem here lies with our definitions and stereotypes. We have been trained to believe that ignorance is undesirable. We live in a world where knowledge is king. In this enlightened era, we negatively connote the notion of ignorance, but ignorance – or more simply defined, not knowing – is the root of all knowledge! Without acknowledging that one does not know, how can one strive to learn and to understand?
For it is when we have come to that place of understanding, where we finally understand that we don’t understand – that is when we begin to enrich our lives and become filled with more. That is when we can exercise our curiosità.
As someone once so rightly pondered, "How can we exercise our ignorance which our growth requires, when we're always exercising our knowledge?"
To write drunk, then, is to live, to act, to initiate without inhibitions.
But that is only half of the statement, half of the battle.
Revision is the act of reflecting over your experiences, and determining what you ought to change. As the great movie so adequately puts it, “A good pilot is compelled to evaluate what’s happened, so that he can apply what he’s learned”.
We must have that same compulsion to evaluate, to critique, to examine. It is only then that life can be elevated into more than just a random series of events, of actions and reactions. It is only then that we can begin to intentionally take charge of the directions that we take.
Revising sober, then, simply means to examine one’s life with utmost scrutiny with the intent to learn and gain further understanding of one’s experiences. We are to examine without prejudice, to reflect with an open and curious mind, to review all that we have done so that we can affect change. And that, without a doubt, is a good thing.