Change

When I wrote, earlier this month, of wanting to write words that count, and to honor the rests between them, I knew that I was leading up to something. That something is an attempt – no, a need - to begin integrating various aspects of change that have been happening in my life: changes that have felt separate but are, in fact, all related, all pointing in one direction:

- The move from 30 years of life in a rural Vermont village to an urban life in a large international city.

- The loss of my mother, and all the changes that has created for me and my immediate family.

- Menopause.

- Meeting a life goal - the publication of a book - and then thinking about what comes next.

- My creative life and my “work” life: changing priorities, balances and intersections

- My spiritual life and religious beliefs, which have undergone yet another shift.

I'm getting ready to write more about all of these, but this post is a general one, looking at the big picture.

I learned long ago that writing -- the outward form of my thinking -- is the best means I have for discovering how the various separate and confusing threads of my life actually relate to each other, and how they weave together to form a whole cloth. I’ve kept journals most of my life, because writing is the way that I make sense out of the jumble of thoughts in my head. It takes a while, and one has to be patient: the “Writing On” posts I linked to last week were written a year ago, when, in the immediate aftermath of a book project and my mother’s death, I was trying but still unable to see much farther ahead. Writing is also the way I remember: not just what happened, but who I was at a particular time. Looking back, I can sometimes also understand why.

All around me I see bloggers re-assessing their commitment to this medium, often because they feel they’re spending too much effort toward it and too little toward work that feels more “productive,” or “real” or “lasting”. I don’t see it that way. If I weren’t writing here, I’d be putting the thoughts into a journal or letters launched at indulgent friends, or middle-of-the-night conversations with my patient husband who has little need to sort out his own life this way. And yes, the blog can serve my literary life in the sense of being a place to try out ideas and to assess my commitment to subjects. But it is something in and of itself, and whether it continues to exist in this form is not nearly as important as the fact that it happens.

The blog or journal is, actually, a mirror of that movement through life that I observe in myself -- neither like the geese flying across the still photograph, nor like an individual being standing motionless while life swirls around her -- but rather the sense of myself as a moving, mutable being who exists in inner and outer worlds that are also in states of constant change. Seen in that way, the “self” doesn’t exist; it cannot be fixed. We humans spend much effort trying to deal with our discomfort about that dual movement, attempting to fix ourselves in time or trying to find ways of convincing ourselves that we won’t someday stop while time continues without us. So we write books, paint paintings, take photographs, build buildings; we have children and fixate on our belief that they represent a continuation of our own animation; we construct religions and place our hope on immortality.

I see all of this in myself. In my life’s passages I’ve toyed with, or even been obsessed with, all of these efforts to deal with questions of identity, meaning, and mortality. I still hope to write more books, and paint more paintings, to be involved with people and organizations whose work will continue after me; to build relationships; and most especially, to love. What I find, though, as I teeter on this strange place that tilts inexorably toward my own aging and eventual demise, is an emerging sense of the worth of being present not only to myself and "the moment" – that hackneyed expression – but also that an aware and acknowledged presence in the now-ness of life, in spite of the reality of aging and swiftly-moving time, is, paradoxically, the most solid gift I can give to other people. Living into this groundedness more and more fully is probably the best goal I can set for myself.

Comments

[marja-leena]

Your wise words really sing for me, as I have been doing a lot of thinking about life and death right now. Thank you, Beth.

[Dave]

You can talk about change all you want, but I'm glad you're planning on sticking wth the blogging, Beth. Thinking about blogging in relation to aging, I wonder if it's really a coincidence that a majority of the blogs I read are authored by women in their 50s?

[beth]

Curious. Why do you think that is? And thanks for being glad I'm sticking around. Hope you will too, in one form or another. It begins to be kinda like marriage for some of us who've been doing it this long - sharing the dry spells, irritations, and periods of boredom, and appreciating new qualities like loyalty and tenacity and endurance, as well as the highs when new insights and inspiration come forward. Watching good bloggers work through the challenges of the medium is a whole subject in and of itself - one that I think most of us never anticipated!

[Dave]

Why? Well, one can scarcely be a good writer without a deep awareness of morality and ephemerality. And in our society women even more than men are taught to value youth and fear aging. So it makes sense that thoughtful, middle-aged women would make particularly good bloggers. But there's also the simple fact that the most faithful diarists and voluminous letter-writers down through the ages have been women.

[Dave]

Make that "mortality and ephemerality."

[marja-leena]

Interesting what you say, Dave! And I tend to agree about older women bloggers, and about their 'deep awareness of mortality and ephemerality'. Like Beth, I'm glad you are reading us and we're all sticking around through the dry spells and the creative spurts! Not being a writer first, I've been an on and off diarist through life, but have found the blog has become my journal of sorts. Curiously most of my favourite blogs are by writers.

[loren]

I'd have to agree with almost everything you say here, Beth.

I've never been much of a diary writer, but the longer I've blogged the more I like this medium.

So much so, that I don't really have any other literary aspirations.

[maria]

A great post and the discussion that follows is evidence, in my view, of how the blogging form is actually like fertilizer for writing. I wish I could elaborate on this, but am pressed for time(from which I am hoping to press my own blog post, perhaps, on the subject -- one of these days.)

[Jim Murdoch]

Do I want my writing to last? Yes, of course. I could seal it up and stick it in a history box and it would last. What do I want more than that? I want to affect people. I want to make people stop, take stock of their lives, and then move on. I want to put into words how I feel and hope someone out there reads them and says, as one man did when he got read one of my stories, "How does this man know how I feel?"

In the film Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins, who is playing author C S Lewis, answers the question, Why do we read? as follows; "We know to know we are not alone." I have never heard a better explanation. Of course we read for other reasons, to educate ourselves, to distract ourselves even, but I am always taken aback when I read a few lines in a poem or novel that get it right, that say it like it is. And I can do that. I have done that.

So we write blogs. So what? Granted, it's not a particularly pretty name for what we do but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. The bottom line is people read these and people are affected by these. They don't always leave comments but then more people who read our books won't give us feedback than ever will.

[Dave]

I've been an on and off diarist through life, but have found the blog has become my journal of sorts.
For what it's worth, I never managed to keep a journal for longer than a month before I started blogging. I guess I am a performer at heart.

[kaycie]

Beautiful. The words you put down do communicate your thoughts in a clear and immediate way. That is one of the reasons I enjoy reading your posts. Whether they are introspective, or posts about interaction with others, I have a real sense of you, even though we've never met.

[Peter]

Blogging is doing something similar for me. Maybe it's because I'm feeling less and less "commitment to the medium" of blogging, however, that I still blog. If it were still another commitment, as it was as late as last summer, I'd have to stop. My commitment to blogging feels like another attempt to fix myself in time, to use your apt description.

Blogging relates to me slightly differently right now than it has in the past. While my site is still in many ways the monument to my disquiet that you describe, somewhere blogging is also exactly the mirror you describe. Blogging is too much like what I hope to get out of writing for me to want to stop.

(Actually, my blog comments serve me better as mirrors. There’s something about responding to well-timed stimulus that helps me the most.)

Thanks for sharing here, Beth.

[Jean]

Thank you, Beth, for this. So much food for thought. So much that I identify with. And other things I need to think about more. And so much love for you and what you're doing here. I will be back, to think and write about this much more.

[Fred Garber]

While doing all of this, do not forget to eat your eatmeal!

[Fred Garber]

Oops! Oatmeal instead of eatmeal. No. Stay with eatmeal!

[Lucy]

Challenging and affirming at once. Thanks and good courage.

[beth]

Thanks, Loren, it's always good to see you here. Yes, that's the way I feel much of the time - it suffices for me.

Hi Maria, thanks for the comment - and I do wish you'd elaborate on your thoughts soon! For me, blogging is both the fertilizer and the writing itself - I'm seeing less and less distinction or hierarchy of value between the two. What do you think?

Hi Jim, thanks for these quotes and your thoughts on this subject. I think you've pretty much hit it on the head.

Kaycie - thanks. You may be right - when I've met other bloggers in person, they've told me I was exactly the way I sound on my blog, no big surprises! I've never been very good at artifice, which can be either a liability or an asset in a writer!

Peter, thank you for making this careful point about "commitment." I'm glad the post prompted this response for you because your comment made me go a little deeper, yet again. Thank you for being the mirror for me!

Jean, because you're a longtime meditator, I'd be very interested to hear your further thoughts, so I do hope you'll say more on this eventually. Thanks so much for your kind words.

Fred - I love "eatmeal!" I think you've permanently transformed my mornings!

[margaret]

Your words are so profound, and so lovely to read, as ever.

At Thanksgiving, we remembered you & J. as one of the blessings this year brought to us.

[margaret]

Oops, should've said "two of the blessings" but in fact I meant that friendship is itself a blessing.

[dale]

(o)

[Diana Christine]

My breath was caught in my throat in your opening lines, as I feared a possible announcement of your "moving on" from writing this web log, and so soon after I've just discovered you! But wait...your post is to confirm, not close, the work you are doing here. Thank you for opening your inner world to the rest of us in such rich and vibrant tones, and for continuing to do so.