Believe it or not, sometimes I have thoughts that I just don’t want to put down on this blog. Big thoughts. Deep thoughts. But they’re thoughts that I don’t really want to explore too much. Whether it’s that I don’t want to think about them too much, or that I superstitiously worry that by writing about them, I might attract the attention of unwanted things. Though really, I think it all boils down to one thing: that I worry that I won’t be able to get the essence of what I mean down into a form that other people can understand what I’m trying to say.
We read things online, and we want to label them. We want to file them away and forget about them, ignore them, agree with them, but be done with them. At any one point in time, I might be reading about the most recent quantum theory discoveries one moment and then learning what an old friend’s dog was up to the next. You’d figure one of these would get more attention from my mind than another, and they usually do. But you’d be hard-pressed to know which one. Sometimes it’s the discoveries and sometimes it’s the dog.
If I can’t even pay attention to important things for longer than a couple of moments, how can I trust other people with some thoughts? What if they only read them for a moment and then dismiss them? Or what if (even worse) they never even feel like clicking through to read them at all?
Writing a blog the way I do (and following the page count statistics as I try not to but inevitably do anyway), it’s hard not to boil down my posts into categories of my own. Successful. Thought provoking. Quickly forgotten. Ignored. Controversial. There have been a few times that I spent a good deal of thought and effort on a post, only to have it get swallowed up and forgotten. Was it not as interesting as I’d thought it had been? Did I say something wrong?
It’s not like I lose sleep over the idea, but the feeling isn’t something that goes away. It’s there in the back of my mind each time I write a post. Each time I put some of myself out there. I don’t generally mind putting myself out there. That’s why I write, after all. But it’s why I can’t write some things. Or at least, why I haven’t been able to write some things yet.
What sort of things?
Fears, often. Worries. Personal concerns. Ironically, they’re the sort of things that I’d probably benefit the most from sharing. The sort of things that other people have experience dealing with, and that I’d be helped by exchanging ideas about them. But no one talks about them. No one seems to discuss them. And so the thoughts end up like Middle Schoolers at a dance, all of them wanting to do something, but none of them actually daring to start it. Too worried about what other people are thinking.
Forgive me for getting a bit broody today. Friends of the family have been dealing with the death of a child, and that can’t help but make me introspective. I look at my own children sometimes and I wonder. Do they know what I feel about them? Do they know how much I’d love to just hold onto them and never let them go, but at the same time how much I want them to be able to fly off and succeed and never look back? How I worry some nights that something might happen to them, and worry other nights that something might not? Sometimes it feels like my family (loving wife, happy children) is like a wisp of smoke. Visible, present, but fleeting and gone the moment you try to hold onto it. The slightest puff can make it disappear, but if you try to hard to keep it a certain way, it dances around your fingers and is gone just the same.
In the end, life is something that can only be done by living. You can try to video it, or record it, or write about it, but none of that really replaces what lies at its core. It’s Wily Coyote running out over that ledge. Think too hard, and it all becomes incredibly difficult. Just keep pumping your legs, and you can go on running for miles.
Like I said. Some thoughts, I just can’t get down on paper. No matter how hard I might try. Catch you all on Monday. Maybe I’ll be less introspective and reflective then.
I liked this post, Bryce. A lot. I think you’ve “put down on paper” what many of us think every day. And you know those personal concerns that you don’t usually write about and people don’t talk about? They *will* talk about it if you put it out there. Many of my blog posts are only about the things no one wants to talk about (particularly death) and yet those are the ones people comment on the most. It’s always comforting to realize that others are thinking or feeling the exact same thing you are.
Thanks, Holly. I appreciate it.