I know this will wind up being a very short blog post (especially for me), but then, there’s a lot going on: a move is a big thing, after all. But I’m no longer scared. I’m excited.
Sure, there are a lot of uncertainties, but I’ll try to just take them as they come.
And above all, I’ll do my best to remain – at the center of all the madness, and no matter what happens – the calm at the eye of the storm.
I’m scared.
What I should be is asleep, but it seems my fears are getting the better of me, and perhaps what I need most right now is to express those fears, to use someone – or something – as a sounding board, to hear the echoes of my thoughts in the hopes that maybe I’ll calm down a bit and feel less anxious about… well, about everything, really.
Because I, as I said, am scared. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at me; it’s a fairly quiet version of the emotion, somehow, not exactly the kind that has you visibly gripping the edges of your seat while watching a scary movie. It’s more pervasive, subtle, almost subconscious but palpable nonetheless. It’s the kind of feeling that invades the mind and makes itself at home, entwining itself with your thoughts and becoming a part of your mental process – assuming you let it stick around long enough to get a proper hold. I’d rather it didn’t, but how to make it let go? And how long has it already been there without me knowing?
That’s part of the problem: I’m not sure I recognised my fears until recently, or at the very least not enough to know them as such. But fears they are. And I’m scared.
I’m scared of not finishing the things I start, and scared of not getting ahead. I’m scared of staying always in one place, and I’m scared of not staying in one place, afraid that in thinking I’m moving forward, I’m actually just changing the scenery but not the script. I’m scared of repeating past mistakes, albeit in different surroundings and with different actors, and I’m scared of remaining stuck in old patterns, of not changing myself and my life for the better.
I’m scared too that I somehow left the better path behind me, took the wrong fork in the road – and I’m really scared, one might even say petrified, that “the better path” might be on some other road entirely. I’m scared that the best choices I could make are ones I don’t even see, either because I can’t imagine them as actual possibilities or because the circumstances of my life until this point have steadily erased any trail I might now find myself wanting to explore.
And what if it’s just my fears keeping me from exploring those trails, however faint they might be? Am I really going on my own unique journey or am I just following along where countless others have already tread out of some vague, inescapable desire to conform? For all my independence, for all my quirks and self-avowed individuality, am I still somehow afraid to step too far away from the expected, from the norm? Am I afraid to go too far afield in case what I find out there doesn’t measure up, in case I don’t measure up? If that’s true, I’m scared that I might not realise it until it’s too late, until a combination of factors – like age, prior choices, and the like – have conspired to completely eliminate any means I might have had of doing something about it, of changing direction.
Come to think of it, do I even know for certain what direction I’m going in now? Does anyone? I’ve always had many goals and many dreams, but sometimes – especially lately – that seems less like an asset and more like a liability, particularly when the pursuit of one feels like the abandonment of another. With a great big mental sigh, I suppose I have to admit that that’s likely an unavoidable part of life for everyone, that to “be something,” you have to actually make a choice and thereby give up on being something else… but what if I can’t decide? I’m scared of my uncertainty, scared that my inability to confidently pinpoint my passions, or at least a narrow range thereof, might be preventing me from focusing enough to actually accomplish something worthwhile with my life.
I guess, when it comes down to it, my biggest fear is failing to successfully shape the me of today into the me of tomorrow, all as a consequence of not fully knowing what I want tomorrow to look like – or how to get there even if I did. Should I just keep to the familiar, well-worn path, stay on the course that my life has already established? Or do I go off and cut a new track and hope to find my bearings along the way?
I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I’ll let you know once I figure it out.
The fire dies,
The spark has gone,
The embers lose their glow;
The soul gives in,
The mind gives up,
The heart begins to slow.
But Death is not
The culprit, no,
It’s hope that’s burned away
And with its loss
The self endures
The same kind of decay.
The light will fade,
The warmth will cease;
One difference, though, it’s true,
That with the glint
Of future love
The flame might burn anew.
Perhaps the spark
Is always there,
Still ready to ignite
The soul with fire
Of hope once more,
To burn away the night.
Strange, the wind
Blows fast and
Strong, lifting the
Sand from far-off
Lands and carrying
It away to
Distant, lonely shores.
Strange, the waves
Roll quick and
Rough, stealing the
Sand from far-off
Lands and taking
It away to
Distant, lonely shores.
Strange, the water
And the air,
Strange, the flow
Across the world;
Strange, the sea
And strange, the
Sky, their hold
Upon the world.
What a funny thing it is, that a blog can feel neglected.
Or rather, that the blogger feels neglectful, I should say, since of course a blog can’t feel anything, so far as we know. (Ghost in the machine? An A.I. with an online journal? … What a different book William Gibson’s Neuromancer would have been if Wintermute had been blogging his - or its – way through cyberspace. But I digress…)
What’s the big deal, after all? It’s not like there’s a rule saying you have to write so-and-so many blog posts per month. … Well, unless you’re doing a company blog of some kind and your job depends on how prolific you are with your postings. But for the rest of us, what’s it matter if a few weeks go by without an update? Or even a few months? (Or, for the truly slack, a few years?)
And yet, for me at least, it does matter. It feels somehow “wrong” to have a blog and not use it, to not make sure it stays “fresh” with new posts, whatever their content.
But why? FSM knows I don’t (yet) have that many regular readers, at least going by my (scarcity of) comments. Keeping a blog active is probably a good way to get more readers, of course, but is there another reason?
Is a more active blog more deserving of its existence? Do frequent postings somehow justify its presence in the blogosphere? I suppose you could say that a blog that’s not updated ceases to be a blog, in the strictest definition of the word. On the other hand, I’m sure there are plenty of blogs that – for a variety of valid reasons – no longer get new content (outlived their original purpose?) but that still have interesting & worthwhile posts archived from way back when. Still, I think there’s a difference between a blog that’s been permanently retired and one that just gets unintentionally forgotten; does the blog collecting dust in the proverbial corner not have just as much right to its little virtual life as any other?
If so, then why the guilt? It’s sort of similar to the situation you can find yourself in with friends you haven’t talked to in ages: sure, you feel bad, but as long as you do eventually call (or e-mail, or text, or whatever) and reconnect, isn’t it “all good”? Naturally, a blog is not quite the same as a living, breathing person (though see my comment about Neuromancer above) – and your blog can’t really be the one to initiate contact with you, unlike your longlost friends – but still, it’s similar.
Maybe what it’s really about is that, in posting infrequently, you feel you’re not helping your blog reach its full potential. … Actually, now that I think about it, the same might be said about infrequent contact between friends and the squandered potential of those friendships.
But that’s life, I guess, both for blogs and friendships. You do what you can and try to get on with it, dusting off that neglected thing in the corner and polishing it up even when you’re afraid that – after all this time – there might not be any shine left underneath.
Our Blogging, which art in WordPress,
Hallowed be its name;
Our writing done, the comments come,
And our spam queues please stay barren.
Then give us, this day, our daily blogroll,
And forgive us our absences,
As we forgive those who forget
To read us.
And lead us not into stagnation,
But deliver us from babble.
For ours is the wisdom, and the candor,
And the really great stories,
Forever and ever.
Amen.
Funny thing about the Internet: it’s often a double-edged sword, at least when it comes to using it to feel “connected” to the world at large. It can bring you closer to people and allow you to feel like part of a community, or it can cut you down and make you feel like you’re the proverbial wallflower, unseen and unheard by the chattering crowd.
Of course, it’s all in how you wield it, whether you take advantage of the opportunities it offers to express yourself or whether you let yourself remain the quiet observer. From blogs and photo sites like Flickr to online forums and social networking sites like Facebook, it’s easy to wander, looking at what other people are doing and saying without actually making your presence known.
It can be fun, true, and interesting, even inspiring, to use the Internet as a window into other people’s lives, but at some point that window feels too much like it’s made of one-way glass. It didn’t use to be that noticeable, back in the day when there was a tad less emphasis on the social aspects of the ‘Net, before people were putting their lives online en masse. Now, though, when it seems everyone has *some* aspect of themself willingly posted for all to see, not following suit can be a rather lonely prospect.
A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a link to the White House’s newly updated Civil Rights page and pointed out the addition of a section on issues important to the LGBT community. I read through it, and I have to say, I’m honestly very impressed. And actually, not a little teary-eyed as well.
Now, I know that these are really just words, and that especially in politics words don’t usually mean a thing until something actually gets done, but still… the sheer existence of this section, on a page called “Civil Rights,” on the website of the White House! The website that, to quote a line from one of the first blog posts under its new leadership, will “serve as a place for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world.” The official electronic mouthpiece, in other words. The one-stop resource for all things related to the new presidential administration, its views, policies, and current plans.
And a resource that’s being used, at least in part, to talk about support for things like repealing the military’’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy… and support for repealing the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” and expanding the rights given to same-sex couples to include all of the more than 1,100 federal benefits as well… and even support for expanding adoption rights, in language that can’t get much plainer or more direct: “[President Obama] thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.”
… Wow. Just… wow. Talk about a turn-around from the previous administration, eh? Again, it may not be “real” in the political sense until the legislation’s drafted and things get changed and repealed and enacted in the proper way – and I’m sure that, even for Obama himself, there are plenty of hoops to jump through – but it’s still amazing, not to mention supremely uplifting, to know – hard as it may be to believe - that on the actual website of the President of the United States, there is FINALLY direct, unequivocal support for LGBT people and their rights in words that don’t reek of two-faced, patronizing hypocrisy.
Change has come, indeed.
I’m in a rather contemplative mood at the moment. I suppose I’m always kind of in a contemplative mood at some level, given my perhaps overdeveloped self-awareness (and/or self-consciousness), but tonight it’s especially palpable. And for good reason: touched off by a vague feeling of dissatisfaction (whether valid or not) with my life’s accomplishments – personal and professional – thus far, I started thinking more deeply about my past and what’s led me to this point in my present.
Somehow, that wound up with me looking back at old text files on my computer, files with scraps of writing and poetry of mine from as far back as 1996… half-finished book ideas, paragraphs of introduction to stories that never got the attention they deserved, lines of verse of varying quality but with relatively consistent themes… even files that contain nothing but a single sentence – or even just a title – that nevertheless managed to convey (to my own brain, at least) where I wanted to go from there.
I know what you’re thinking (you anonymous reader, you). You’re thinking that my little foray into the depths of my hard drive has me regretting all those ideas that I never went anywhere with, that I’m wistfully wondering why I even then, 12 years ago or more, could seemingly never start something and finish it. And you’d be partially right. Especially in light of my recent posts on the concept of failure – and reflecting Natasha’s spot-on comment about “inertia” – I do feel a bit like a broken record that keeps going over the same groove but never gets anywhere worthwhile.
That’s not really it, though, or not all of it. I enjoyed reading what I wrote back then, after all, and if I start to ask myself why I didn’t continue with some of it, I just tell myself, truthfully, that I wasn’t ready to, that they were great ideas but ones that I – in all honesty – probably didn’t know how to fully give life to at the time, that today I have more of the skills and knowledge and experience to convincingly translate those ideas into “reality.” I can still take those ideas and run with them, so to speak.
The real problem is that in reading through my past writings, seeing those ideas again brought to light and interpreting them through the lens of my mind of today, I wonder not so much why I didn’t do more with them when I first thought of them… I wonder, instead, where I’ve been since then. Where’d the “me” who wrote those book ideas and introductory paragraphs and lines of verse and story titles go? Why haven’t I looked at them before now and – perhaps more importantly – why did so many of them seem so new? Why – for a person who always prided himself on his imagination and his sense of fantasy and wonder – do they all seem so far away, like ancient history?
Have I really let myself become so absorbed in the inanity of the present – the rat race of everyday reality and the focus on all the pointless minutiae of modern society – that I forgot about all those worlds and stories and characters of my childhood and early teenaged imaginings? How did my mind get so clouded by a daily routine that I lost sight of the fantasies within, the ones that – when I was younger – mattered more to me than anything?
When did I lose my way?
As a quick-and-concise follow-up to my previous post on failure, a bit of wisdom from Sir Winston Churchill:
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”