During Passover, we remember the days our ancestors were enslaved in Egypt and their heroic journey of crossing the Sea of Reeds into freedom. Passover is a time when we share these stories around the table, remembering the hardships of our people and rejoicing in the freedom we experience today. Click here for the Ultimate Message of Passover.
When you write, do you experience freedom or slavery? Are you enslaved to writing a certain amount of words per day? Do you admonish yourself if you don’t? Do you criticize your own writing? If you’ve experienced similar thoughts to these, you’ve experienced the metaphorical Pharaoh. 
We all have him in our minds. The question is, do we let him enslave us or do we cross the metaphorical Sea of Reeds into freedom? What does freedom look like in your writing? Does it exist in those moments when your writing flows out of your fingertips effortlessly? Does it exist when you experience true joy accompanying your characters on their adventure? Or does it exist when you are so immersed in your writing, you forget it’s dinner time?There’s a beautiful tradition on the night before Passover where, after many days of cleaning and getting rid of leavened bread in the house, we search for any breadcrumbs we might have missed.In the dark corners of the room, we search with a feather and a candle and gather the bread crumbs into a bag. The next morning, we burn these bread crumbs as a symbolic way of ridding ourselves of our inflated egos. During Passover, we want to envision ourselves as if we were the ones coming out of Egypt. In order to do so, we need to get rid of our inflated egos as we step into the Exodus story.In a similar way, I’d like to suggest that we can step into our own stories; the ones we are creating. In the same way we try to imagine what our ancestors must have gone through, we can imagine what our characters are going through. And in the same way we get rid of leavened bread, we can rid of our puffed egos in our writing. The metaphorical Pharaoh can no longer control us; telling us our writing needs to be perfect or that we need to write a certain amount of words per day or else. We have the power to cross the metaphorical Sea of Reeds and let go of what no longer serve us.I wish all of us a renewed sense of freedom to create what makes us happy and to do it with a humble heart. Happy and meaningful Passover.
If you’d like to add a bit of extra fun to your Passover table, order your very own copy of 300 Ways to Ask the Four Questions.
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