Long before I began this blog in early 2003, I’d been documenting the events of my life in diaries, journals, projects, and letters. It began with a Garfield Diary, complete with tiny lock and key, in about 6thgrade. What goes into a sixth grader’s diary? Sadly, I don’t remember, and I’m fortunate in a way that it was nothing too serious. That’s much too young to have anything worthy of commemoration. In various fits and spurts, I’d add to the little book over the years, much in the way that I would crochet a few more rows in a never-ending blanket (that remains unfinished to this day) from time to time. Eventually the secrets got darker, and at some point in high school I decided it was safer to destroy it than keep it hidden. I don’t recall how I did it, whether I burned it or shredded it or dismantled and spread it around like a serial killer, but by the end of high school, my childhood diary was no more. My childhood had suffered the same unsensational fate.
That was when my creative projects began, and I poured the semi-auto-biographical drama of a teenager into words and images that I’ve been doing ever since. It was 1993, and since then I’ve been a keen documenter of my life in one form or another, sometimes taking creative liberty with things and changing them just so, or simply jotting things down in an old-school Backstreet Boys daily planner. (Oh relax, I had an ‘N Sync one the next year.) Eventually that release and expression took the form of this blog, but the reality is that my life has been recorded in some form or fashion for the past twenty-six years. For the first time, I’m starting to feel the fatigue of it. Maybe it’s the overwhelming wave of social media saturation that has flooded our existence in the last few years. Maybe it’s the work that goes into sustaining a daily blog that been going since 2003. Maybe it’s just finally growing up and out of the need for such self-analysis and introspection. Whatever the case, I’m tired.
I also miss being off the grid. Even when I was writing projects and sharing things with people in the 90’s, there was always the option of shutting it off and disappearing. Those options are sorely limited now. The simple necessity of a cel phone makes it almost impossible to completely turn off, and most of us have too many obligations to be absent for too long. That is taking its toll, whether we realize it or not. I firmly believe that is not a human being’s natural state. We are designed to rest and relax and simply not think for every second of the day. We were made to reflect and take in our surroundings, to be still and quiet from time to time, to fully decompress and allow our brains to settle without excessive stimuli. I look at some young people today and marvel at their inability to even sit still without scrolling through a phone or bopping to whatever is being broadcast in their earbuds. I do not envy that life. I do not envy today’s youth. And I know they don’t envy me. I guess I just miss the days of quiet.
The same goes for a bit of the unexamined life. I miss that. There is an art to simply existing, a certain beauty and skill involved in experiencing something – anything – just for the sake of experiencing it – and without recounting or documenting or telling a story about it afterward. I still manage to make such moments happen. Not always purposefully, but sometimes they are deliberate, and not always perfectly, because sometimes things don’t work out the way you envisioned. They have been moments just between me and the universe, never documented, largely forgotten, and all an integral part of enriching the soul.
I’m aiming to have more of them, and less of this.
