Write Like It’s Your Last Piece

A guest post from Jasmine Clemente

Hi Mindful Writers, I’m delighted to welcome Jasmine Clemente with a guest post today. Jasmine writes Spiritual Goodness where she explores ideas from Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Judeo-Christian traditions, to help us navigate the times we find ourselves living in with more peace and clarity. Please do let us know in the comments what her words inspire for you.

If you’d like to write a guest post for The Mindful Writer, you can send me your ideas here. Please read previous guest posts and my archives to get a feel for what would fit!

And a reminder that this Saturday (11th Oct 15:00 - 16:30 BST) I am running a Zoom workshop and I’d love to see you there (replay provided if you can’t make it live). The Healing Narrative: Transforming Personal Pain Through Story. Discover ways to write about difficult experiences so that it promotes healing for both writer and reader. This compassionate workshop provides frameworks for approaching challenging material with mindfulness, establishing healthy boundaries, and crafting narratives that transform personal struggles into universal insights. Good for both fiction and memoir writers.💙

Father Time has an exit point for all of our lives — we just don’t know when, or at what hour, will be our last. Without obsessing, we tend to forget that it’ll ever happen in the first place. Forgetting so much so that we might even take some days for granted. But what if a bird traveled from beyond to bless you with a gentle message, preparing you for your final days? How might that information change the way your words land across the pages of your book, blog, or blank screen?

I’m a forty-something-year-old woman approaching middle age, and I have to say, I can feel the subtle shift within my spirit, guiding me back to an immortality that doesn’t reside in this world. And I’m okay with that. Actually, I’m more than okay with that. But with this awareness comes a deepening in my work, as if every piece I write simmers into the etheric fields of infinity. And so, I think, what kind of energy do I want to imprint into the minds of every reader? Even if they only skim through my work, reading just one bold but brief sentence that can live inside their subconscious mind for years or decades, with the power to one day awaken a new thought, gradually growing into a new neural pathway. It happened to me.

When the late Guru Dr. Wayne Dyer passed away in 2015 (Author of The Power of Intention), I shed a few tears as if I’d known him, because of the way his books changed my life. No other celebrity had ever affected me because I hadn’t known them beyond the bookshelves or television screen. Still, in this case, I actually applied the advice I read from Dr Wayne Dyer and watched it transform me. As a result, it made me respect the man behind the mission. And so today, as a forty-something-year-old woman, I look around and wonder how my work might impact strangers I might never even meet. And how will yours?

If you knew you had five years, one year, or even one month left to live, what would you write about? It’s okay if you’re not looking to influence the masses, but even if it’s just one person reading your work, how would you want them to feel —or what would you want them to know?

Maybe you have a food blog featuring your favorite dishes, but when you describe the way your wedding cake tasted on the day time stood still, the cream suddenly feels sweeter in their imagination. Or perhaps, you have a fitness blog, but now, when you explain how grateful you are for your body being the vehicle that took you to visit the Great Pyramid of Giza (one of the seven wonders of the world), readers are reminded to acknowledge their ancient inheritance as they become inspired to honor thy temple. Suddenly, your fitness blog takes on a whole new meaning, reflecting the power of life and vitality.

I don’t believe I’m nearing death anytime soon, but I’ve lost plenty of people, as I’m sure we all have. Whenever I lose someone, memories replay in my mind of our most special moments. It could be the way one of my dearest friends convinced me to abandon my office job and board a plane to attend a music festival where we had the time of our lives, only to later attend his funeral from an unforeseen heart attack. Or the way my ex-fiancé walked up a ladder, fixing stage lights for my performance, telling me he believed that I could be a star, only for him to die from pneumonia at 39, not yet turning 40. Those small but essential moments replay once you receive the news that they’ve slipped away-- too soon, too unexpected.

While I don’t think about death often because I’m too full of optimism for my future, I won’t take the inevitable for granted. One day it will surely come. But until that day, I pray that my work does what God intended it to do: give life.

I pray your work does too.

What will you write about next?

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