Can’t sleep, brain buzzing, an open expanse of night summons me to write. Writing, any kind of writing, now a rare luxury in my life, once a necessary desperate striving for connection in the midst of savage loneliness.

Time and space. Luxuries. The catch-22 of a marriage and career in the city.

Writing is hard, as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out so well.

I showed that interview to my small group of 6th grade boys today, Gentlemen Jaguars Study Squad, as we call ourselves. I watched my students squirming to formulate their thinking and feelings into the confined lines of their ruled journals, living out Coates’s words: writing can be absolute hell.

My hope is to get my boys started on a journey where they will know this struggle to craft the sparks of music within them into prisms of wisdom as worthy of a lifetime’s investment, worthy of that perseverance and persistence that Coates also spoke of, so they may carve their way into moments of breakthrough.

It’s been so long since I’ve felt that music pouring out through my own fingers. I am filled with doubt I will ever know that sense again. Yet I am inspired by my students. Especially the ones struggling with a worldly weight they never chose to bear, who arrive each day, smiling, grateful to be there.

Coates touched on something else there, too. That breakthrough only comes, perhaps, as the outcome of great duress.

We are forged, one way or the other, by the anvil of our lives. It is no great loss to the world I may lack the will to write. I hope that I may add something else through the work that I do each day.

So back for a few more hours of rest, I go.