JOURNAL [previously published in "The Flatland Oracles"]. One of my friends said that she had clicked through my blog site but was discouraged by the length of a lot of my postings. Blogs, she pointed out, are supposed to consist of short, concise postings designed to interest and amuse someone who is, say, illicitly surfing the net while at work. That's the blog audience.
It's a valid point and in fact has certainly occurred to me. The thing is, I personally am NOT the sort of person who reads that sort of posting. I like to read, I read fast, and I like to read whenever I can, so I am constantly surfing the net looking for things to read that will take me more than 15 seconds to digest. I am the T Rex of net readers!
I suppose I write the sort of postings that I would like to read myself. I am going to try to use this page for the sort of short, frrequently updated bloggings that I see elsewhere, but my real interest is in writing about the topics I've chosen to write about. And sometimes it turns out I have a lot to say once I get started.
I'm not really the 'Dear Diary' type, being well past the age when exploring my consciousness or talking about what I do when I'm not blogging can hold my attention. Been there, done that.
I do like reading journal-style blogs about OTHER people's lives. Some people make their blogs a sort of window into their consciousness. To do it well---and I know of several bloggers who do it exceedingly well----requires great courage and also the ability to think about what you're thinking about while you're thinking about it. It's much easier to do this when you're young or fairly young, I imagine. There was an age when I considered myself a fascinating enigma. I spent a certain amount of time pondering the mystery of Me. If blogs had existed, I'd have written one. I wish they had existed. I wish I had a record of my life as it was unfolding, and the capacity when I needed it to share that process with other people in my life.
Grief and time have done what they do to rub off the sense I had at one time in my life of being special, of being singled out. I miss that feeling. Once it passes---IF it passes----you lose the mainspring for that joy (which is sometimes euphoria) of feeling that your life is filled with possibilities; that there is excitement in store and that the theme of your life is still emerging and yet to be realized.
Because: at a certain stage, it IS realized. At a certain point, you know who you are. While the possibility remains of further evolution, your emotional and physical and psychological investment in your identity gets higher as you get older. Being happy takes precedence over feeling joyful, and happiness relates more, I think, to your perception of what IS than your anticipation of what MIGHT be.
Furthermore your priorities change. Once you are settled and you know---at least for the FORESEEABLE and ACCEPTABLE future----what you are going to do with your life and who you are going to be with, your attention shifts to other issues. I am a middle-aged woman---and God, it's hard to believe that sentence even when I say it to myself, even when I write it-----and my concern now is to make some sort of use of my ever-diminishing present.
Blogging seems as good a way as any. I no longer believe that I will become a celebrated writer and win a Pulitzer prize. I no longer believe that I will travel the world----I very much dislike leaving my home----or that I will rise to the heights of my profession. For any of those things to happen, massive changes would have to occur, and they are changes which I would hate, which would spin me around the way my husband's death did six or seven years ago. No, my concern now is to hold onto what I have and to like what I get.
I do appreciate the glimpses that some bloggers (mostly women as women interest me most these days) provide into lives that are very different from my own. It's interesting to have my attention drawn to aspects of every day life from which it would normally slide right off. At no cost to myself I get a deepened experience of the world and some insight into all the things I could be thinking about or doing (but don't).
I put my own words out there because it's possible, I guess, that there are women like me who share some of my concerns and who might in due course be looking for something to read that describes experiences and feelings similar to theirs. During the worst period of my life, the internet provided me with resources to see that I was one of many women in my particular predicament. (It also provided me with the resources by which I met my husband Nick, though that's another story). Maybe someone out there is going through the loss of a spouse, is epileptic, suffers from panic attacks as I used to do, is struggling with questions of religion and faith, etc. etc. and will stumble across something of mine that she can make use of or that at least will assure her that she is not alone..
At present, that's the sum of my ambition as a blogger, to be a temporary resource for someone who is looking for proof that she is NOT unique, who needs reassurance that bad times, like good ones, eventually pass.
Later that Same Day.
I was casting about trying to think of a film to see this afternoon; a young friend reminded me of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." I still haven't processed it fully, but it WAS a wonderful film. It was both frightening and encouraging. Al Gore may yet turn out to be one of the heroes of the Millenium. Already I am feeling so vindicated, you know? Anyway: I am a full Gore film fan!
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