Heavy subjects on my mind, but no clarity. As I don't feel I have anything to add to the conversation, I won't talk specifically about what happened at the Boston marathon on Monday afternoon. What felt so very strange was watching the raw photos and eyewitness accounts on Twitter only minutes after the explosions happened, with no context, no analysis, no filter -- much like being a witness to something rather than being given a story, or told a story. In the evenings I am reading the Little House on the Prairie books to the kids, and when Pa has to go away to work he walks hundreds of miles, and his family waits for him to come home, with only one letter, months into his absence, to assure them that he is well and alive and will be returning to them.
I wonder if people used to be better at waiting, more practiced at patience.
Now we want to see and know instantly. I can text my husband from the grocery store to ask what's missing from my list. I can text him a play-by-play description of the swim race my daughter is swimming in, even though we are 100 kilometres apart, and send him photos of the event. I like this. I'm comforted by it.
But I also recognize that I expect it, almost. I feel like I need to know. I also feel like I need to express, immediately, whatever it is I'm thinking. What are we recording in our blogs, in our Facebook statuses, our tweets? It's the minutiae of where we're at, in this moment. It's the stuff of life, the stuff that does not keep, no matter how we mark it, and broadcast it to our friends. This too shall pass.
In the end, I'm not sure our narratives, the ones that are being written now, the stories that matter to us and stick with us, are all that different from the books that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote. She wrote her childhood experiences first as a memoir, but that version was rejected by publishers. Finally, she shaped her memories into something different, going from first person to third, eliding experiences, leaving great swathes out, altering the tone, turning the minutiae, the scraps, into a whole arcing storyline. I feel like I'm telling my story in real-time, here on the blog, but that it's not the same story I would tell if I decided to write a book about my life. Do you know what I mean? And yet, in both mediums, I am hoping to land on something universal, something lasting, some deeper human connection.
This blog plays the part of witness, I think.
Right now, today, I am suspended. I'm waiting. It feels like I'm waiting to find out about EVERYTHING. No amount of texting and twittering and Facebooking can tell me what's going to happen. In this way, I'm not so unlike Ma, and Mary, and Laura, and Carrie, waiting to find out what's happened to Pa, going about their daily routines, keeping busy, keeping their spirits up, hoping for the best. No matter how immediate our access to information, Life remains largely mysterious. The shape of our lives remains mysterious, as it is happening to us. And so we pluck out the scraps and offer them for examination. We photograph our meals and our cups of coffee. We record the kilometres we ran today. But it doesn't really tell us, does it, where we're at, and what is happening to us, or, more precisely, what is going to happen.
I suspect that the instantaneous nature of contemporary communication only distracts me from this truth. Patience remains an art that needs to be practiced, and appreciated. And so I wait as best I can.Labels: blogging, books, kids books, reading, spirit, spirituality, writing