Silence in the Temporal

I took a break from writing on this blog because things in this world felt overwhelming, and the information we all get in the course of one day felt like it was too much.  Why add to it on the Internet?   Sending thoughts out into the world is the eventual natural desire of someone who wants to write stories in books.  But in this current modern age, I wonder how this should really look for someone like me.

The things I tend to say on this blog are fairly intentional about the things that are right in front of me.  Teaching, experiencing this world in different ways through interesting people, the things of our culture that astonish and impress.  (Or don’t.)  I know what I tend to say, and how grave it can sometimes sound.  

It goes like this.  I come to the page with a vague agenda in my mind of what I actually want to write.  Then the words come out.  And are instantly said here.  But I’m not sure I like that I all of the time.  I am not sure if things that sound so deep in the end, which have initially come from just traipsing along in life and noticing what I am seeing, is my favorite thing. 

In taking time to breathe in and out and keep things simple and all of that, it has also occurred to me in another fresh wave that the Internet for my generation is an amazing tool for narcissism.  Two seconds later, that is countered with the thought of how amazing technology really is.  And I feel like a curmudgeon.  Or at least more of a cynic than people first think.   I think we have all woken up to this at some point.  The fact alone that my students use the Internet in ways I never did at their age makes me feel a lot older than them, and the concerns about how they see the Internet are very real.  For everyone, there is a cost, and I think that being incredibly dialed in to something does not always mean that you are producing anything wonderful at its end.    

My big dream, even more than wanting to be a teacher, is to write things and make them into books.  I understand that when you do this you are opening yourself up to a world of review and rejections and applause to some degree too.  But I think the irony is that this is not usually what drives writers.  Or maybe it is, and I need to learn a few things about life.  There is a very pragmatic and practical side of my life that people tend to see first before the rest of me.  I have crafted this on purpose, and in a world of being the teacher, this is what I must do.  I like this about my life.  And I am still being me.   

It’s just that there is more, and that part wants to write books. And send things into the world in print that matter to someone else.  Or help them a little when they look up and see their world too.

One of the most inspiring things I have read about writing comes from George Bernard Shaw, and it says this.

The man who writes about himself in his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time."

When I see those words, it reminds me that writing is inspiring because it makes people think of humanity.  Lots of people who tell a big story in this world over thousands and thousands of years.  It makes me think about an artful God who crafts this story at all.  It reminds me of seasons in life, of the verve people have for certain things and not others, of redemption, which has the ‘power to deliver you into the hand of God, which is where you wanted to be all along’, so says Shauna Niequist.  These are the things I say yes to. 

Someone recently told me that facebook was not like a blog, and I kind of disagreed with him.  I think the Internet is the Internet is the Internet, and it’s come through our generation in such a frenzy that no one really prepared for it.  They were swept up too.  Maybe this is the time to sift through it.  weigh the words that come to us about the things in this modern age that confront us.  In addition to a classroom, I want to talk to the world using printed words on paper.  I have always known this.  But I had to step away to make sure I was doing this right.  The why of life is sorely overlooked sometimes, isn’t it?  I think it’s relieving to address ‘why’, at least at the right, good moment. 

What also helped me was remembering to breathe.  Listening to songs by Ingrid Michaelson, and praying about the world I’m in.  It always helps me to think about how God is not in time.  That we have something in us that is astonished by the passing of time.  C.S. Lewis says that this is because we are not only temporal, even though this is the world we are in.  There is more, and we feel it.

It helped to be with people who shove aside their newspaper on the messy end table and invite me in for tea.  It helped me to wake up to an alarm instead of the myriad of words from the radio.  I have a brain that never stops thinking, and I guess I have to take care of how I wake up. What a strange thing to say in comparison to most of world history, when people woke up to complete silence or at least voices in the next room, and did not imagine it to be any other way.

So I am back to this place, and I hope you are too.  Sifting, traipsing along, looking at the world, doing my work, stepping out of the hustle and bustle and into the things that are favorites about this temporal world.  Cheers to a new week, and many good things coming your way.