Recently, I’ve begun to think of life in terms of coordinates. Perhaps I’m a tad pattern hungry, but a model of life as we perceive it seems to make a lot of sense if I look at it as a series of coordinates. And by coordinates I'm talking about the location of everything vis-à-vis the X and Y perpendicular axes of time and space—meaning, the precise, pinpoint position of where something is and when it is. In other words, the coffee shop/café across the street from where I live might seem like just a quaint college hangout with a wicked backbeat from the steam function on the latte machine. But, if I walk in there at 2:00 for, let’s just say, anything with bacon, that little café represents half of my universal coordinates of time and space. And of course the other half is registered on the clock, which seems to tick at an inverse rate proportional to my growing anticipation of pork.

And don’t worry, if this introduction to what’s on my mind today has once again left that particular impression that can only best be summed up as “duh”—be patient. It’s fun to swim in these waters.

Okay, so if everywhere I am and everything I do can be located as coordinates of time and space, then what happens when my coordinates of time and space coordinate with your coordinates of time and space? It seems to me when coordinates overlap you have business, commerce, friendship, marriage, family, society—or perhaps just toes being stepped on. Conversely, when coordinates are out of touch for long periods, there may result severe social disconnect, resentment, hatred, even war. Culture is born in coordinates, and coordinates can easily function as crosshairs if perceived as sufficiently distant from one another.

Historic coordinates can, if we let them, play hard and heavy, fast and loose with our present coordinates. But what about future coordinates? What about the seemingly simple act of making an appointment? Isn’t that an extreme example of exercised optimism? After all, when one makes an appointment, one is actually coordinating coordinates. The appointment maker is coercing an intersection of time and space and then promising to place his or her feet upon that intersection—an intersection that is not currently occupied by anyone. Those coordinates don’t even exist, and yet most of us behave as if they’re set in stone, as if they’re as real as the coordinates occupied while making the appointment. Kinda almost makes one doubt the “reality” of those too, doesn’t it? But, assuming for the sake of argument that current coordinates are the only real ones we’ve got, then even if the appointment maker is planning something heinous, the wholehearted belief that the planned future intersection will exist and that he or she will be there to live it is the definition of optimism. And ironically, faith.

So, if making an appointment, setting up a plan, and committing to something or someone are examples of optimism implemented in all its glory, then what can be said of the writing life? I offer that writing is a supreme example of exercised optimism. Each moment spent writing is the equivalent of making an undetermined appointment with an unnamed reader at an unnumbered time in an unknown location. And yet we still do it. Even if the planned reader is only oneself someday and the words are never meant for other eyes, by the time each of us arrives to the place where we can read what once we wrote, we’re forever changed by the coordinates we’ve passed through along the way.

So, for the writers out there who get discouraged and manage to wallow in easily accessed self-loathing—despite the fact that the hours spent staring at a blinking cursor and then tapping it into meaning are in actuality hours spent as the very face of faith and optimism—I say get over it. We’ve got a date, remember?