Essay Writing a Spiritual Practice?

   There is a certain point where I start to see term papers as koans: you wrestle with them over and over, trying to tease out the answer to the question you are trying to pose. All the while, the answers always elude the mind, because there is no one single answer. And the deeper one goes into the process, the more one can only feel that the topic one has chosen never exhausts itself.
   I think there is always an opportunity to see writing an essay as a spiritual practice, particularly when one is using the essay to wrestle with a deep question which becomes uniquely one's own. It's certainly not easy these days to find the time to really engage this process, and the tendency in many schools is to rush the process. I recall my writing teacher from OISE explaining that writing needs to take place on a daily practice, as a kind of discipline. Yet, somehow, schools try to accelerate the process by requiring students to write only one paper, and then leaving it to the end of the semester to complete. There is a tendency in these situations to put off the process of composing the writing to the last minute, and this can compromise the process of revision that is such an integral part of writing and forming one's ideas.
   I think that if one really budgets their time, they can work out a paper through an entire semester of writing and rewriting. By circling around the subject many times, one gets to see this nature of writing as a process of tuning into one's thoughts, observing them for a while, and then realizing that these thoughts don't capture the reality of what you are exploring.  This process, if attended to patiently, can lead to a repetition of efforts, where a writer keeps trying out new ideas to see how they flow and whether or not they fully capture the inquiry to which one engages. Circling back again and again to this original question can become like a practice of engaging a koan: always approximating the reality to which one is pointing, yet never truly arriving anywhere. I think that no matter what inquiry one engages in, this is the real fruit: it's knowing that there is never one single answer to a question. It's also to know that this process teaches so many things about the nature of the universe, but only if one has the courage to realize that there is no settled, final answer to anything, even after a person has turned in the 'final' copy of the essay. This process is deeply humbling and rewarding at the same time.
    This process of writing essays sure won't get you money or a steady job, but it teaches you many other skills, foremost of which are patience and an insight into the impermanent nature of one's own thinking.