writing.
I felt [...] a growing sense of excitement: not so much a governing idea as the feeling of something brewing. [...] You become alert to everything, including things that everyone including you had long regarded as boring or unimportant, and everything you encounter, however accidentally, seems potentially rich with significance. [...] I trusted the marvelous feeling of alertness because I trusted the energy that it would confer upon the act of writing. I believed then and now that only in the act of writing can one discover what one needs to say.
Stephen Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Stephen Greenblatt Renaissance Self-Fashioning