My Editorial Ghost

I have three blog posts that I started for today but they're all pretentious wastes of words and you don't need to read them.

That's not true. I don't think they're pretentious. I'm only saying that so that you'll think I have some humility about what I write. I think there's value in the ideas, but they're half-formed and I haven't been able to sit down and make them write themselves out of my brain because I'm working and I should be studying and I have this thought that I simultaneously love having and know that I shouldn't have and my mental powers are consumed between working and studying and struggling and so my output is not what I want it to be. It's fine. It's trying. I wrote this paragraph so that you would see that I value who I am and what I do and what I think. I wrote this paragraph to set up the critique that I over-value who I am and what I do and what I think. Please don't think so little of me as to assume that I haven't already bounced this ball off the walls of my mind. The repetition has left a dent. 

You can never really know what's in someone else's mind. They can tell you, but you don't really know. You can't experience it. You physically cannot see the world through any eyes but your own. The taste and touch and smell and sound, the way the minutes tick by and the colors dance, the distance between you and every other object and being in the universe, the way in which the universe enters into your understanding of it, all of that is perfectly unique to each person who experiences existence. I can tell you that I love you, but you don't really know what that love feels like. You don't know how strong or weak it is, how much it's based on careful consideration of the emotions I've experienced and how much of it is intuited from two glances and a dance. I can tell you how my stomach jumps when I think about you, but you would still have to relate that back to a time when you felt butterflies over someone you have affection for. Even then, we had two distinct experiences that may or may not have any relation to each other. Neither of us will ever actually know if what we feel is the same thing. There might be no one else in the world, feeling what I feel right now, would classify it as love. There's no externally verifiable evidence here. There's only the indescribable qualia of the heart. And if you think this paragraph is just about processing something in my experiences, you've missed the existential point in favor of the sensory one. Maybe that's what I wanted when I wrote it. But better to give me the benefit of the doubt and think that I intended for the honest example to draw you in and hoped that you would make a wonderful connection with it.

So if there's a real way in which we can't understand one another, can never understand one another, can never actually connect with each other on a basic level, do we despair? Do we consign ourselves to waving at each other from across the chasm of our perpetual separation from every other human? Do we learn how to embrace the loneliness that the nature of our existence seems to force upon us? Are you judging me for using too many rhetorical questions? If this were a court room, would you object loudly to the judge that I'm leading the witness? Be patient with me. I promise I have a point. I assumed, when I set out to write, that you'd be with me in this, that you'd hang on for my point, that you'd trust my guidance as we wander through the mire of consciousness together. Have the generosity of spirit that I assumed you'd have.

Humanity, I think, has never despaired of its loneliness. We talk. We talk and we listen, we write and we read, we make movies and art and write songs and poetry and share those things with others. We seek experiences. We travel to new places, we explore, we seek out the company of others and when that company cannot be found, we invent others. There is some kind of calling in our bones to be community, in relationships. We will shout across that void and toss light and lifelines until our throats are raw and our arms exhausted. If you're distracted by my use of "light" in last sentence and think it was left from an earlier draft, the first thing is that the joke's on you-- the majority of my posts are first drafts-- and the second thing is that I have been told that poets sometimes will place words together that don't make sense in order to force you to lean into that incongruence and source it and wrestle with it. I revel in mixing metaphors and I know it upsets people and I am not bothered by that. There is an infinite set of things I am bothered by, but the majority of my writing choices are not contained within it. What I want most from you is for you to respect those choices, to see them, acknowledge them, listen to them, question them, engage with them, and to never sweep them under the rug as if I believed so little in the impact of my words that I would toss them about like leaves in the wind instead of the precious children that they are to me. I may toss them in the air, but never too far and never beyond me ability to catch. 

This month is National Novel Writing Month and I don't think it could have been more timely for me.  No matter how prepared you think you are for it, seminary is an upheaval of the soul. There wasn't the tearing down of foundations for me like there may be for others, but that's because I already did that on my own. I have been re-formed and I have been shaped and every step of the way I have had to be intentional about the way in which that reformation has happened. I got a thought I need to deal with, a longing that I need to write around, and I think it's going to have to be long form. I wasn't going to do NaNoWriMo this year because making the time for it will be an endeavor, but I need to shout across the void. Even if no one ever reads it, I need the practice of expressing something which I have found to be true.

Some people can express their truths through their actions. The beliefs they hold deep are written in the lines of their faces. I need to practice that, to be better at loving people in the real world we all inhabit together, to see every person that comes before me as a person and as such, valuable. I need to care and care deeply for others and I have to be better at expressing that through my life. But I have these words, you know? I have these thoughts and I am tired of apologizing for them. Because I wrote this paragraph to tell you that I know that I have to love others and I undersold my ability to care for them so that I'd fit into your narrative of who I am, or what I fear your narrative for me is. Please don't treat me like a new soul walking into this strange world without any ability to do anything other than absorb. If I am blinded by the cacophony of lights that is existence, it is because I have endeavored to see it. I could have chosen otherwise. 

Anyway, all this to say that I might be a little spotty with the posts this month. I hate not keeping a commitment, especially when I've gotten so much from writing here, but I do genuinely think there'll be a benefit to the change. My pride sits at the back of my head like a little editorial ghost, telling me that I'm good enough without trying, telling me that my disposition is only an advantage, minimizing the effects of the truth spoken to me. Even though my heart and mind has felt the rumbles of the past few months, it'll be good to move into a space with a different kind of resonance.

Maybe I'll learn something that way.

Roses

Last Thursday was a good day. I got up, I went to Starbucks, I got some work done, I went to go sit in Rainy Hall and I knocked out at least 45 pages in my book for my book review, then I went home and made my best approximation of a Sunrise Ski from B-Ski's and took a really well-timed nap and got an episode of Daredevil in before I went out with friends to go see Bonfire Night fireworks then watch V for Vendetta.

Last Friday was a good day. I got up, went to an extra masters-level session for my Philosophy of Time class and not only understood everything that was being talked about but asked a question that led the discussion to an interesting place that produced a clear framework for understanding various ideas about time, came home and made french toast, then went to a seminar on the academic job market, came back home and took an academic break by writing several scenes that made me happy in my NaNoWriMo novel.

Last Saturday was a good day. I slept in and when I got up, I spent the day alternating between writing, academic work, playing my ukulele and television while watching the rain from my window before going out in the evening to a nice little place down the street with some people from my building, where I had one of the best whiskies of my life and talked about everything from arriving in town to working jobs before going back to school to buying pizza at 2am and regretting nothing, then walked home, listing off favorite TV shows and chatting about life experiences.

Last Sunday was a good day. I lazed about, walked with friends to church, got to sing Come Thou Fount, had a real emotional moment with God, several real emotional moments with God, actually, went home, made a better version of the Sunrise Ski, watched some Simpsons, which was on the television in the common room, and got some work done before going to a movie night and having a deep discussion about good and evil and why I still go to church.

Monday was a good day. I got up, took a shower, ate some cereal, went to Rainy Hall, knocked out some reading, wrote a post, then went to a group discussion where the topics ranged from the image of God to transhumanism to Superman.

I'm writing this on Monday night, but let's just assume that Tuesday was also a good day. It promises to be. They're showing Treasure Planet through the film society and I have a friend to go with me and there's talk of nachos.

I don't say all this to be Little Miss Sunshine and Roses. I say all this because there are different definitions of good. I have a friend who is at this very moment reading my definition of what a good day is and yelling, "NEEEEERD!" in the most loving way possible, and that's a good thing too. It's good that there's not just one answer the question of What Makes People Happy, that our experiences of happiness are as diverse as we are. We're all little islands, little worlds inside heads that have to struggle to come together, to connect in any way. The world this week granted me a hundred ways to connect with other people, a thousand graces and miracles.

Which is rather nice, come to think of it.