How much of life is experimental? Would you be sipping your morning coffee if no one had dared to pluck that first wild bean? As a kid, I once sat on the edge of a rainwater tank, cape tied tight, ready to test gravity, launching into the great unknown of my own backyard. Every time we board a plane, we ride on the courage of those who first believed that human flight was more than a dream.
We constantly test small things: Should I say hello to that stranger? What happens if I try this instead of that? I ate that once, never again. But here’s the thing: the well-trodden path is so tempting. It’s familiar, safe, and comfortable, the all-expenses-paid tour of life where someone else takes the risks. The cost isn’t what you think. The cost is absence, the unlived, the unwritten, the quietly missing. What might have been.
This piece is my experiment. Will you like it? Will it offer a flicker of joy or a nudge of encouragement? I don’t know. That not-knowing is the point. The page is a lab; the heart is the instrument; the words are the reaction.
Some small experiments? Consider fragmenting a sentence, stretching a metaphor, leaving silence on the page, writing from a side character’s perspective, or from the future looking back. Dictate a paragraph, handwrite a scene, or set a 10-minute timer and don’t stop.
Experimental writing is choosing discovery over certainty, finding or uncovering what didn’t exist a moment ago. You choose. We choose. I choose. As for me, I’m grateful for the brave sip of the first coffee, the lift as wheels leave the runway, the trembling courage to say, “I love you,” and a life of words that asks, again and again: What might happen if I try?
Let’s find out, together.