As I update an earlier book of mine, A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery, I will be sharing some of my favorite writing exercises with you over the next few weeks.

Here’s the first of several lessons I am enjoying revisiting: A Lesson From Morrie and Rilke

Many of us have read Tuesdays With Morrie; An Old Man, a Young Man and the Last Great Lesson by Mitch Albom, a narrative by a former college student of the last six months of his favorite professor’s life. What is so inspiring in this account is the teacher’s voice and thoughts as he prepares to die but must first finish what he is on this earth to do and that is to teach what he has learned from his experience.

His desire for connection and his pleasure in what connections come his way, particularly the small ones, made me, and I am sure most of the book’s readers, tearful and appreciative. Morrie tells his former student:

You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can’t do that. I can’t go out. I can’t run.
But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do.

I look out that window every day. I notice the change in the trees, how strong the wind is blowing. It’s as if I can see time actually passing through that windowpane.

We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

These words make me think of the poet Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes of Italy and its artistic and architectural treasures:

Through such impressions, one collects oneself, wins oneself back again out of the pretentious multiplicity that talks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.

Reread aloud the last two lines of the paragraph above: ” … and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.”

Morrie looks out one window and appreciates it. Just as Morrie did, you can adopt a window (or if you’d prefer, a place outside). The eternal, no doubt, endures in all places, but there are very few, Rilke tells us, that any one of us can love deeply. He tells us it is something solitary in which we take part when we recognize these few places.

Sit awhile at your adopted window or outdoor place. Jot down what you see, hear, feel, smell, even taste because you are sitting in this spot, in this moment. Observation is love.

Now, imagine yourself the director of your own short film about your adopted place.

• What does the camera select for the viewer to see — people and their activities, plants, animals, man-made technologies and buildings?
• What small things will the camera zoom in on? A plant growing through the concrete, a lingering leaf on a tree branch in fall, the way the stem of a flower bends in the wind?
• Where will the camera pan? Others going about their business? Storefronts and parked cars?
• What are the ambient sounds in this area?

Look, listen, smell, taste and touch. Once we sit and allow the present in through our senses, what is eternal finds a doorway into our consciousness. What is eternal makes itself known to us through our senses when we are not thinking and analyzing, but being.

Now that you have observed and recorded the scene, let someone or something suddenly fill up the camera’s lens. Anyone or anything that pops into your mind can pop into this scene. Writing, we are always in some way weaving together past and present and even the future. But don’t try for that intentionally. It will happen organically as you take in the sensory impressions of your moment at your window. What you have seen, heard, tasted, touched and smelled in that moment will invite in the figure I am asking you to imagine as you let go of intention and are just there in your moment.

Now, imagine you are reporting on an interview you had with that figure. For example, you might write:

When I asked my grandfather why he was up from his grave now walking outside my window on this September day, he looked toward the clouds. I looked, too, and remembered in an instant the cotton twill my grandmother stitched and stitched making hats for women in her neighborhood. I could see my grandfather waving to someone far beyond where I could see. Perhaps he knew something now that he hadn’t when I was growing up. Perhaps he knew something I hadn’t paid attention to. “Grandpa,” I asked, “Did you come to tell me something?” This is what he said: …

Please try this exercise. I believe you will find something unexpected, engaging, and important to your writing.