Negushawagon

Many years ago I sat under a cluster of pines as youth leaders presented on various aspects of leadership. The hours stretched into days with each lesson blending into the next. One particular class stands out from all the other drowsy, sun-filled summer days because the boy that was teaching it, the chief over this Native American-themed camp, began by yelling aloud the word “NEGUSHAWAGON”. The word means confidence in the language of the Lenni Lenape tribe of Delaware. The proper noun form means more correctly “one who has the confidence to accomplish the task”. For the rest of the class , every time the teacher would say the word confidence, our voices would ring out Negushawagon! As our teacher taught us about how self-confidence reflects itself in leadership he instilled within a bunch of sleepy scouts a seed of confidence to accomplish whatever endeavor would be their lot. I have found this brand of confidence to be an integral part of success in writing as well as leadership. One obstacle that every writer must overcome, is to develop the confidence necessary to share your imperfect thoughts and feelings with the world through the written form.

Why is confidence so supremely important? A few weeks ago, I had the assignment to take one of my own papers to be tutored at the University Writing Center. Hesitating outside the door, I held my paper in my hand knowing that it had faults in it but still valuing it as part of my soul reformed to bound to paper. Did I dare show it to someone who not only had to read it but was intentionally searching for faults? Although I knew there were faults and that the unknown tutor through the door was sure to find them, I had to muster the courage to reveal my soul to the barber. I did so because I knew that through the unpleasant experience I would be able to accomplish the assignment I had been given and thus become a better writer.

You see, Negushawagon isn’t about being puffed up or cocky about your ability to write. It isn’t sticking out your chest and submitting your grocery list to the Pulitzer Committee. Its about having the faith that even though you will mess up and the experience will be painful and humbling you will be better and more capable in the end. Confidence is not arrogance. Confidence to write is the ability of a humble person to expose their thoughts to the world without arrogance but without fear. Confidence says that even though I’m not perfect I can still try.

I develop this sense of confidence in a moment of desperation as a child. I hated writing. It was my hardest subject in school. I was a horrible speller and grammar was like the monsters that lash their sticky green tongues out from under the bed. My mother (who on account of my being home schooled was my teacher as well) would sit down her class of two or three and give us essays to write. They were short simple affairs but I would sit there for hours rattling my head for the right words to come. I would put down a sentence and realize it made no sense or that I had drawn a d instead of a b. The errors would paralyze me. I wanted to leave the table and go play outside where neither the birds nor the trees could read letters nor had any desire to learn. It was one of the most difficult times of my early education.

Summer finally freed me. I spent my days gardening, biking around the wild surroundings and reading the stories of a thousand fantasies know only through books. It occurred to me that I had wasted hours staring at blank pages trying to put together a few sentences into a paragraph, and what for? I had never produced perfection no matter how many hours I spent digging through my limited knowledge for brilliance. That fall there was a subtle shift in thinking that revolutionized my approach to writing. I did not have to write something incredible or thought-provoking or world-altering. All I really had to do was fill a page. Complete the assignment and I could leave, regardless of what dribble actually filled the page. From that day in the early fall I determined that I would never sit and agonize over a blank page again. Instead I would write whatever came to mind and thereby gain my freedom.

I did it. Ever since that day when I was ten or eleven I have learned to place my ego under the table and just write. Afterward, my ego returns and frequently I become embarrassed by the writing in front of me but at least it has been written. I can then turn to editing, a process which seems to be never-ending (I can’t read my journal because I constantly edit it). The editing process draws me closer to the sought-after perfection than I could ever dream of while staring at the blank page. The confidence to write in spite of flaws has been to key to me writing at all.

You see, Negushawagon isn’t just confidence, its the confidence to accomplish your task. The confidence to push through whatever muck and grim is in your way in order to gain the prize. Sometimes that means dangling participles, sometime you may splice a few commas or misspell entire sentences but in the end you will have written something. You will have organized thoughts and placed them on paper where the world may see them and judge them. After five or six million typos maybe you will even produce something coherent, something worthy of the power of the written word. Sixty chimps with sixty typewriters may take a million years to produce Hamlet but they will do it far faster than 1000 chimps with no typewriters. So go forth, aspiring writers, put pen to page with confidence and let the words fill the page. You can go back later and capitalize everything.